A blue haze covers the Balcones Escarpment's rolling fields and wooded waterways. At dawn the haze is punctured by an orange sunball. It is 1981, and the atmosphere is clouded by ash from the Mount Saint Helens eruption in Washington, the haziness reminding me of a hot, humid July day. Yet the morning is chilly because the sun is partly blocked. I walk down the hill and whistle our horses in from a pasture along a river west of the escarpment a few miles from our suburb. They are in no hurry to come, for the grass is lush with springtime. I take their cue and poke around.

Surprise, surprise! I find a coral snake, a secretive, poisonous species that hunts small snakes and lizards under ground cover. Poked gently with a stick, it strikes down and sideways with its tail, which is coiled, raised, and has yellow and black bands like the head. The effect, a tail that becomes a "head," is called self- or auto-mimicry. The real head is hidden under body coils. Never does this individual try to bite but soon crawls into trailside vegetation, and I remember being asked to confirm the identity of a coral snake that was badly mangled by a medical patient who showed only psychosomatic symptoms of snake-bite.