Sunday I was fixing our dinner and while waiting for the water to boil I stood gazing out the backdoor window. At the base of the concrete steps I could see about four-foot of the tail of a blue racer snake, the head was hidden by a bush.

I used to see a racer that nested under those steps but I definitely didn’t see it all last year and I don’t believe I had seen it the year before, either.

I called Paula in and we watched it for a while. She asked why it wasn’t moving and I said I imagined that either it was shedding its skin or it was eating something.

Black snakes, garter snakes, racers and even the ill-tempered bull snakes are friends to farmers and those of us in rural settings. They do as good a job keeping the vermin down as a barn cat with the added benefit that we don’t have to give away a box of their offspring two or three times a year.

(I can’t remember the last time I saw a sign in front of a house saying “free snakettes…cute!”)

Of course with all our trees, rocks, shrubs and hiding places I’m sure we have more snakes on our 9 acres than we could imagine, but for the most part very few of us meet very few of them which is probably the best for both species in the long run.

(We have three poisonous types of snakes in Kansas. The cottonmouth moccasin is debated, some say they don’t live here but any outdoorsman knows that they do, though they’re certainly not common. We have the copperhead, a beautiful and very reclusive snake that lives in moist woodland areas and around water,

(We have several subspecies of rattlesnakes in Kansas, the most common in our area being the massasauga, which is an Indian word meaning “swamp dweller,” but one can find them about anywhere, near water or far from it, in tall grass, around rocks, etc.

(Anywhere there is cover/suitable habitat)

Anyway, after watching our racer I thought that there might be just enough light for a few photographs. I went out the other door to the garage and fetched the camera from the car and walked quietly around to the other side.

The snake was still there. The dog was accompanying me and I assumed there would be a ruckus, but Dido has apparently dealt with snakes before, unbeknownst to us, and was very demure. Not only didn’t she bark, she sauntered off rather sheepishly as though she had a previous and important commitment.

Again, I was impressed by the size of the snake, as much as I could see, and concluded this was my old pal from year’s back who had found a very secure and successful place to hole up, underneath our front steps.

I reached down and gave the tail a tug.

Immediately the snake started squirming backwards, toward me, which is unusual behavior. When its head cleared the bush it was under I could immediately see what was up. In its mouth and down its gullet was about 6 inches of a very, very large garter snake.

It had its lunch going down, head first, and out of its fear for me was regurgitating its dinner.

Frankly I didn’t know that snakes could do this and I’m reasonably certainly that many, if not most, cannot. Once the process is started they have to continue swallowing their prey.

Slowly a mucous and blood covered garter snake emerged backwards from the racer’s mouth. The big snake looked at me as disdainfully as a snake can, and crawled through the crack in the step to its burrow within.

I felt badly that I had waited so long to interfere. It would have been one thing if the racer had caught a rat or mouse but I hated to lose another great rodent predator in the way of the garter snake. Besides, this particular garter snake was an old-timer, among the biggest I’ve ever seen.

As I stood looking at it I noted that the garter snake had begun to flick its black tongue out. Within a minute or two it raised its head and then slowly crawled off into the vegetation.

I cannot say whether it lived. A snake’s digestive juices are very potent and start to work immediately. (One time I pulled a giant bullfrog out of a diamond-back water snakes mouth. The snake had the frog by one of its legs. At the end of the day I was walking back the same way and found the frog on the pond dam, dead, and the leg that had been in the snake’s mouth was brown and shrunken, as though mummified. In the end, by interfering with the natural order of things, the frog died anyway and the snake went hungry.)

Anyhow, it wasn’t an important occurrence but an odd one. Now that I read back over this it’s not a particularly exciting event, but it is a slice of life in the country.