[audio] There in a patch of woods in the bottom of a Colorado canyon our encounter with rattlesnakes began with screaming. The teenage family member who was leading the hike didn't notice the rattlers until she was right among them; as she took off screaming down the path, she saw one strike at her bare leg and miss. Some distance behind on the trail, I heard her loud voice moving very fast through the woods. Wide awake now, her brother saw four snakes, and he and his two cousins backed off. The parents and grandparents called out and were answered and now we knew that for eight of the nine of us, a cluster of rattlesnakes blocked the path out of the canyon.

Grandpa Tom had a walking stick and he forged ahead toward the snakes--I felt like I was seeing my father-in-law as the young Marine he was 60 years ago. One snake stood its ground directly on the path, and Tom began herding it to the side with his stick and reprimanding it as you would a naughty dog. "Get out of here, get out of here," he said. Another rattler slid maybe four feet from the path and turned in its coil and gave me its full attention. I returned the courtesy. Its body was graceful loops of solid muscle, and the wedge of its head was keen and threatening. The front third of the creature hovered above the ground tense and springlike, ready to explode, and its tail began to shake. A stupid part of my brain said quietly, "Wow, it really is a rattle." The dry shivering rattle blurred into a hiss that echoed off the leaves of the trees and grasses until all I could hear was its song of anger and venom. My snake was going nowhere. It had room in its sleek ugly head for only one evil thought.

Up ahead Tom had cleared aside the larger snake. It seemed logical that they couldn't strike more than a yard away, so we began to move through. Still the leaves echoed with rattling and a person had to gather a little fortitude to step down that path. I didn't realize until later that the last of our hiking group never saw the snakes. They must have thought we were out of our minds to urge them to come forward into the rattling grove. I don't know what I would have done had I been in their shoes.

Back at the cars we shared what we had seen. My nephew mentioned four snakes. My father-in-law, still a Marine when he needed to be, herding rattlers with a walking stick, said that they could only strike about half their body length, so he understood with some precision the danger zone. But if Sgt. Joe Friday of the cop show Dragnet had asked for "Just the facts, Ma'm," he would have gotten different stories out of every one of us. Most of us saw only half the snakes. One family member saw a snake by her leg and backed away, another was warned and backed away from a snake he never saw. The nine of us had all attended the same rattlesnake convention but each had a different experience. I felt as though we walk down life's path guided by half-knowledge and foggy misperception, most of us armed only with two fingers crossed behind our back.

Driving back toward the city, I noticed a bear making its way across a field. It seemed completely unthreatened by the humans passing in their cars. I decided not to pull over to take a closer look.

Recorded for broadcast Friday, August 23 on 88.1 WVPE, the NPR affiliate for the South Bend and Elkhart, Indiana region.