The Mountain King Part 2

[wilomn]

With the seeing of the Moon and rising of the Sun, he feels himself become energized and curious. The temperature has risen, his yolk is absorbed and he has an urge to more. It is time to meet the world.

The baby snake, red, white and black, stretches out straight for the first time in his short life as he emerges from his egg. Quickly wiggling, slithering and crawling his way out of the calcium sanctuary that had been his home for the last two months.

He slithers over empty eggs and last year’s leaves to the short ramp leading to the chamber’s opening. He pauses near the entrance, blinded momentarily by his first view of natural Sunlight. Tongue flicking slowly, he tastes the air around him, having been preprogrammed while still in the egg to know food, enemy, and water all by smell alone; he scans for danger.

His eyesight is not acute, details are somewhat blurry, but he sees motion very well. The Dragonfly drifting by he can see. He knows there is a large Blue Belly Lizard just outside the opening who may be much too large to eat now, but may, in a few years, be a tasty meal. He could not pick the Ground Squirrel out of the background hodgepodge of sage and granite and Manzanita, but he will see it anew every time it moves. He does not see the Raven in the Pine Tree fifty feet above his home. Again he is urged by something within to go without.

He’s ready. He has tasted no Weasels, no Coyotes, no Skunks, and no other snakes, no predators at all. Slithering slowly, cautiously forward, looking and smelling as he goes, he is about to emerge from the hillside when suddenly he is knocked down, pounded into the floor of the tunnel by one of his brother speeding up the dirt ramp out the opening onto the granite hillside.

As his brother clears the opening, just as he is fully exposed, all 9 inches of him out on the granite face of the hillside, the Raven silently drops off his branch, swoops down, fast with the sun at his back, and snicks up that snake on the hillside, quickly smacking him on a nearby rock three times and then swallowing him whole, giving a hearty Quark when he finished, eying the hole to see if a second course would be forthcoming. Hoping and quarking, hopping and quarking again, the raven waited to see what else the morning would bring him.

Having had his brother squash him so unkindly had sent the little Mountain Kingsnake back into the egg chamber to hide among the eggshells while his courage was replenished. He was now the last baby to leave. If he ever left that is. It was a big and scary world out there.
He had not felt the happy-dance vibrations of the Raven in some time and the little snake was once again ready to brave the new world. Still moving slowly, though quicker than before, he slithers out the opening, down the rocky hillside to the tall grasses that bordered the small stream at the bottom of the gully. In the grass, hidden from above, he feels much more secure and confident.

His skin is beginning to feel tight, as if it didn’t fit, as if it were shrinking or becoming too small for him. He knows he will soon be shedding this first skin, crawling out from the old one on the outside with a bright shiny new one, giving him more room to grow before he must shed his skin again, something he will do several times a year for the rest of his life.
He needs to find a safe place to hide and wait until he is ready to shed. Once he does that, he will also need to hunt. He knows that while he is not now hungry, that will soon change and he will be very hungry indeed. Shedding is almost always accompanied by hunger. He knows this though no one has ever told him.

Finding a fallen tree he crawls underneath the rotted back, into the tree’s interior where it is dark and moist and safe. There he waits for the next several days while his body prepares itself for the next phase of his life. The hunting phase, the eating phase, the dangerous phase.
Five days after slithering into the rotted log, a dull and dingy red, black and dirty white snakelet, he crawls out after shedding that first skin. Bright White, Dark Black and Blood Red, he is beautiful. He is also hungry. He needs to eat and off he goes, looking for his first meal.
Undulating next to the stream he finds the nest of a Meadow Mouse. In the nest are 4 baby Meadow Mice, pink and helpless, eyes shut, ears unopened, just waiting to be eaten. He though, being a Mountain King, does not like Meadow.

Lizards. He likes lizards. Rough scaly lizards like the Blue Belly he saw on his hatching day, smaller, but the same flavor or the smooth hard skinned skinks or, best of all, the soft smooth skinned geckos that he had never seen but knew lived in the same rocks that he was born in, the same rocks that would be his home.

Continuing his search, he slithers right through the nest, crawling on top of the baby Meadow mice, never hearing the squeak about his bad manners, but leaves them completely alone. Tongue a-flicker he seeks lizard scent. He licks rocks, plants, dirt, branches, leaves, everything he possibly can, he licks. He must be careful, something like a big Alligator Lizard or a hungry Vole would make a meal of him if they found him first. Finding a small lizard is good, being found by a large lizard is not good. He must be cautious in his hunting.

Up a Manznaita branch, over to the Dogwood, down the Pine and onto the Granite he slithers, never stopping, seeing the meal he knows he needs. Hunger is his companion.

A motion, quickly seen then gone. There, to the right, just over the branch laying next to the large Granite boulder, a small dark lizard. Baby Blue Bellies need food, lots of food. The must move about to find food. Small insect don’t just come crawling up and ask to be eaten, the much be sought out and captured, eaten as quickly as they are found. This seeking and capturing is done by moving. Moving makes you visible to small hungry Mountain Kingsnakes. They like little lizards that move.

With the scent of his first meal fresh from his tongue to his brain, the hunt begins in earnest.

[rabernet]

Ohhh.....part 3, part 3, part 3!!!!!!!!!!!!

[ballpythonluvr]

Great Wes! Please do a Part 3!