I’ve been volunteering at Big Bend National Park for going on seven years now, and I’ve seen my share of wildlife — javelinas, roadrunners, the occasional black bear. But I never saw anything like what happened last spring, off the Old Maverick Road trail. I still think about it every time I drive past that spot.
It was a Thursday in late March, and I was doing my usual afternoon patrol, checking that hikers had water and nobody was doing anything foolish. The desert was still, the way it gets before the sun starts to drop — air thick with the smell of creosote, and the sky turning that pale orange that means dust somewhere over Mexico. I had a peanut butter sandwich in my pocket, half-eaten, and I was just about to turn the truck around when I saw a woman off the trail, maybe a hundred yards out, crouched near a big creosote bush. Her silhouette was all wrong for a hiker taking a break; she was practically on her knees, leaning forward.
I parked the truck and grabbed my radio. “Ma’am?” I called, but she didn’t turn. I figured she might be injured, or maybe she’d found something. I started walking toward her, crunching over the caliche. As I got closer, I could see she was poking at the base of the bush with a long stick. And then I heard it — a dry, rasping rattle that made the hair on my neck stand up.
Sure enough, tangled in the skeleton of an old ocotillo that had fallen into the creosote was a snake. A big one, pale as old bone, thrashing weakly. The ocotillo thorns had it pinned, and every time it tried to pull free, the damned thing just got more stuck.
“Lady, step back,” I said, louder this time. “That’s a rattler. You don’t want to mess with it.”
She looked up at me. She was maybe forty, with a braid of gray-streaked hair and the kind of calm face you see on people who do yoga in hot tents. “It’s dying,” she said. “Look at it — it’s all pale. It must be sick. I can’t just leave it.”
I stopped about twenty feet back. “It’s not sick. It’s probably just shedding its skin. They look like that before they peel. And even a sick rattlesnake can bite.”
She shook her head, her focus back on the snake. “It’s suffering. I’m going to free it.”
I’ve been around enough stubborn people to know when arguing is useless. She’d made up her mind. So I did the next best thing: I walked back to the truck for the snakebite kit and my satellite phone, and I stood there and watched. I figured the worst that would happen is the snake would get free and slither away, and she’d feel good about herself. I didn’t actually expect the snake to turn around and thank her.
Her movements were deliberate, I’ll give her that. She used the stick to hold one of the ocotillo branches down, then her hands — bare hands — to snap off some of the smaller thorns. The snake went still, its black eyes tracking her every move. The rattle buzzed a few times, but it was like the sound was on low battery. The poor thing was exhausted.
After about ten minutes, she managed to lift the main branch trapping the snake’s body. There was a dry crack, and suddenly the snake was free. It slid out into the open sand, about three feet long, and for a second it just lay there, tongue flicking in and out. The woman sat back on her heels, and I saw her mouth twitch in what might have been relief.
Then the snake coiled.
I’ve seen rattlers strike before, and it’s fast — faster than you can blink. This one didn’t even rattle; it just launched itself, hitting her right on the meat of her left hand, between thumb and forefinger. She let out a sharp gasp, more surprise than pain, and the snake uncoiled and started moving away through the brush, bits of white, papery skin peeling off its body as it slithered. In a few seconds, the pale color was gone, and I could clearly see the brown and black diamond pattern of a Western Diamondback. A big, healthy, venomous son of a gun.
I ran to her. “Let me see.” She held out her hand, and I could already see the swelling starting, twin beads of blood welling up. My brain kicked into first-aid mode: keep her calm, immobilize the bite, get help. “Sit down right here. Don’t move. I’m calling for a chopper.”
But the woman did something I’ll never forget. With her bitten hand already turning the color of eggplant, she reached into her pocket with her good hand and pulled out her phone. She opened the camera app, steadied it, and took three rapid pictures of the snake, which was just disappearing under a prickly pear a few yards away.
“For the venom,” she said, her voice eerily steady. “So they know which antivenom to use.”
I just looked at her. “You’re taking pictures? Now?”
She shrugged, a tiny movement because she was holding her bitten arm against her chest. “They have different antivenoms for different subspecies. The photo will help.”
I didn’t know if that was true or not, but I wasn’t going to argue with a woman who’d just been bitten by a rattlesnake and had the presence of mind to photograph it. I got on the satellite phone and called the Park Service dispatch, giving them our coordinates. They said they’d have a helicopter from El Paso airborne in twenty minutes.
While we waited, I helped her lower herself to the ground and propped her back against my truck tire. I got out the snakebite kit — not that those suction things ever do much — and wrapped her arm loosely with an ace bandage. Her lips were getting pale, and her hand looked like a rubber glove someone had blown up. She was silent after that, her eyes tracking the sky. At one point she asked me for the time, and I told her it was a quarter after five. She gave a short nod, like she was filing that away.
I’ve sat with hikers before who got heatstroke or twisted an ankle, but this was different. The desert felt huge and indifferent, and the only sounds were the distant buzz of a border patrol chopper and the wind through the creosote. I gave her some water, and she gripped the bottle with her good hand, taking small sips. She didn’t complain, didn’t cry, didn’t say “why did I do that?” She just waited.
When the helicopter appeared, a red speck against the blue, she turned to me. “Will you do me a favor? If I pass out or something, tell the doctors to look at the photos on my phone. The code is 4728.”
“I’ll tell them,” I said. “But you’re going to be fine.”
They loaded her up, and the last I saw was her handing her phone to one of the paramedics and saying something about “last three photos.” Then the chopper lifted off, dust flying everywhere, and I was alone on the caliche with my half-eaten sandwich lying in the dirt.
I thought about her all night. The next morning, I called the hospital in El Paso. They wouldn’t give me details, but the nurse I spoke to let slip that a patient had come in with a rattlesnake bite and excellent photos of the snake, which allowed them to administer the species-specific CroFab antivenom right away. “Saved us a lot of guessing,” she said. “That stuff runs about two thousand dollars a vial, and with the exact match, she only needed one dose. Total treatment cost her insurance a little over eleven thousand. She’s doing well, should get full function back.”
A week later, I was doing another patrol when I got a call from dispatch. There was a package for me at headquarters. Inside was a new snakebite kit — one of the expensive ones — and a note on a torn-out piece of notebook paper. It read: “For your truck. Next time you meet someone as foolish as me, you’ll be ready. — H.”
No address, no last name. Just her initial. I put the kit in my glove box, and every time I see a pale snake in a bush, I think about her hand, swollen and purple, pressing the shutter button on that phone. Eleven thousand dollars and one photo. That was the price of saving her hand.
