I remember the pressure of the mesquite branch across my spine. Three days, maybe four. The sun climbed, the sun dropped, and every time I tried to slide free, the dry thorns dug a little deeper into my scales. I was not going to die like that.
This happened in the wash behind Tanque Verde, east of Tucson, where the prickly pear grows thick and the cicadas start their electric buzz around three. The air at four in the afternoon was 108 degrees. I lay twisted in a deadfall where a flash flood had toppled a mesquite branch onto my coils. The branch was heavier than anything I’d ever fought. Each time I lunged, the twigs only tightened.
The woman came down the trail with a pink Hydro Flask dented near the bottom and a scratch on her left sunglass lens shaped like a question mark. A broken hair tie hung from her wrist, and she had a Garmin watch that beeped once when she stopped. Her name, I would learn later, was Kendra, a thirty-six-year-old ER nurse at Banner–University Medical Center. But that afternoon she was just a shape blocking the sun.
She saw me from ten feet away and said, “Oh, hell no.” She took a photo with her phone. Then she stood there, one hand on her hip, chewing the inside of her cheek. I couldn’t rattle. A hawk had broken my rattle the spring before, so I made no sound. Coiled in that brown tangle, white as bone, I must have looked like a sick pet somebody dumped.
Kendra said to the air, “You’re not a diamondback. You’re too white.” She stepped closer, her shadow falling over me. That was the turn: she thought I was harmless, a pet gone wrong, not a Crotalus atrox with albino pigmentation and a missing rattle. She set down her backpack and used a stick to lever the mesquite branch up.
The pressure eased. I slid one coil free, then another, but my body had gone slack from exhaustion. I couldn’t move fast enough. Her hand came near my head—not to grab, just to move a twig away from my eye. My neck snapped forward before I could stop it. My fangs went into the soft meat between her thumb and forefinger. I tasted salt and copper.
Kendra screamed and yanked her hand back. Two dark holes wept onto the sand. She didn’t stomp me or pick up a rock. She stumbled backward, said, “You son of a bitch,” and then pulled out her phone again—not to call for help, not yet—to take another photo of me. That photo saved her life, though I didn’t know it then.
She called 911. Her voice came out like she was ordering coffee: “Crotalus atrox, albino, bite to right hand, forty minutes from the trailhead.” Then she looped her canvas belt above her elbow and pulled tight with her teeth until the veins in her forearm stood up like roots. She sat down in the shade of a palo verde, her back against the trunk, and spoke to the dispatcher about landmarks. “The saguaro with the woodpecker hole,” she said. “Mile marker two point seven. I can hear the roadrunner.”
I stayed coiled in the open, too spent to move, watching her. Her face went the color of old paper. Her right hand swelled until it looked like a rubber glove someone had filled with water. She kept repeating the species name, “albino western diamondback,” because the dispatcher didn’t believe her. She spelled it out: “A-L-B-I-N-O. Western. Diamondback. Not a Mojave.”
The helicopter came after forty-one minutes. Two paramedics jumped out and lifted her onto a stretcher. One of them saw me and said, “That’s not a diamondback. That’s a white one. You get a photo?” The other paramedic grabbed his phone, got a picture of me from six feet, and then they loaded her in. The rotor wash flattened the creosote bushes and filled the wash with the smell of jet fuel.
At the hospital, Kendra got twelve vials of antivenin. The bill was $143,000. Her insurance left her with $6,500 out of pocket, and she set up a payment plan over the phone while waiting for the swelling to go down. I found this out later, because the story made the local news. They showed her photo of me and the paramedic’s photo side by side. The caption read, “Rare albino rattlesnake bites rescuer near Tanque Verde Wash.”
Three weeks later, a man in khaki shorts came to the wash with a bucket and a snake hook. He was from the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. He caught me not because I was dangerous, but because I was rare. He put me in a plastic tub with air holes and drove me west on Speedway Boulevard. I remember the vibration of the road through the plastic.
Now I live in a glass enclosure with a sign that says “Albino Western Diamondback — surrendered after bite incident.” The floor is sand from the same wash. There is a piece of mesquite branch in the corner, but it has no thorns.
Kendra visited once. She came in the late afternoon, when the museum was nearly empty. Her right hand wore a brace, and she moved slowly past the Gila monsters and the desert tortoises. When she reached my glass, she didn’t tap it. She just stood there, her reflection layered over my body. Then she pulled a pen from her purse and wrote something on a small piece of paper. She folded it once and slid it under the door of the exhibit—not for me, but for the keeper. I could see her through the glass, but I couldn’t read it.
She walked to the exit, and the automatic door slid shut behind her. I pressed my nose against the cool glass and flicked my tongue. It tasted like dust, and the salt from her skin, even though she never touched it.
