My daughter stepped on a little snake in the driveway tonight, and it bit her on the foot. My husband got a good look at it and figured out it wasn’t poisonous, and my daughter was really cool about it. She said, “Well, I don’t blame it for biting me. I’d bite too if I was stepped on.” Then, she proceeded to call her friends and tell them all about it. As for me, my first reaction was a mother’s concern. But, when the danger had passed, my next reaction was as a librarian. I went through my mental book catalog to see if I could recall one about snakes. Turns out, I have a great many books in my home library about bugs (thanks to my daughter’s obsession in her younger days), but none about snakes. So, I used Google. The culprit was a juvenile black racer. Mystery solved. Crisis averted. And my daughter has a cool story to tell….as does the snake.
