When I first moved to New Mexico from Missouri in 1997, I brought along my cats— all seven of them. Four black ones: Peeps, Tubs, Ralph, and Fuzzy, a little white butterball named Fats, a one-eyed grey lady called Mags, and Rosebud, a hardy old tortie, who lived to be twenty-four, probably because of her perpetually crabby attitude.
For their own safety, in urban areas, I had always kept them indoors. So when I moved into my partially finished house on the mesa outside Taos, I thought it would be nice for them to get to roam around a bit, and I began letting them go outdoors for part of the day. That only lasted for a year or two, as interaction with nature became an issue.
My home is literally plunked down in the middle of nowhere, many miles from any town, an off-grid straw-bale house that took me ten years of little-bit-by-little-bit construction to finish, most of it with my own hands.
A few other people live nearby, although none any closer than a half mile, so the local wildlife is as much a part of the neighborhood as humans. There are pronghorn antelope, the occasional elk, the ubiquitous coyote, once a rumored black bear, and rodents by the doubtless millions—of nearly endless variety, including both jackrabbits and cottontail bunnies. Then there are the birds: ravens, bluebirds and mourning doves, flycatchers, quail and three kinds of hummingbirds, owls that you hear but almost never see, finches and sparrows, and a flashy yellow and orange something I saw pass through a couple of times. There are also tarantulas, and to go along with them, tarantula hawks—particularly large, ferocious, orange-winged wasps that lay their eggs inside tarantulas’ live bodies. Eewww.
Then there are the rattlesnakes.
I grew up in the country, but I must have been pretty sheltered, because I don’t think I ever saw anything more intimidating than the black snake that was permitted permanent residence in the oat bin of the horse barn, there to deter mice and rats.
I have to tell you, when you see your first six-foot long rattler, curled up on the front step, you suddenly understand the age-old ancestral fear of wild things. And let’s not fool ourselves—everything out there really is out to get us! Not with malice, of course, but hey, ya gotta eat, right?
Letting the cats out created some difficulties, because cats, as carnivores, will hunt any small thing that moves. So I never did let them stay out past dark, because I knew that once they had fixated on some mouse or rabbit, I’d never be able to get them to come back indoors, which would, in turn, make them easy pickings for the owls and coyotes.
One summer day, I was working on a stained glass project at my desk. The door was open and the cats were enjoying the morning sunshine. About eleven o’clock, a brief picture came into my mind—Tubs facing a big rattlesnake. As I say, brief—the mental picture lasted for all of one second, so I continued working. I kept the television’s volume fairly high most of the time, so, a few hours later, when a sound like shotgun pellets in a dried gourd drowned out the noise from the TV, I was startled. After turning the set off, I looked out the window for the source of this racket: there was Tubs, two feet from a huge rattler, just as the scene had appeared in my mind a few hours earlier. I froze. If Tubs moved suddenly, she’d be struck in the face, and would very likely die from the bite. Fortunately, after a minute, she slowly and cautiously backed away from the snake, which slithered off into the brush.
But I didn’t let it go at that. I knew the snake had made its nest near the house, so there was potential of a repeat performance. I went out, found the snake’s hiding place, and dispatched it.
There was at least one other time that I chose to kill a snake—it had claimed my door- step as its favorite spot for an afternoon sunbath, where it naturally got into a confrontation with another of the cats. Then there were the unnerving occasions when baby rattlers found their way into the house, curling up under the refrigerator or the bookcase—but those I had captured and transported a couple of miles away.
Later, I was nagged by a persistent sense of guilt about killing something whose home I had invaded. After all, I’m the one that’s capable of making the decision to locate to an area that is not paved over and tamed. Living remotely has the advantages of peace and silence, as well as a freedom from the sometimes iron grip of neighborhood obeisance, but “civilized” man, or woman, is unaccustomed to the often life-threatening whims of nature. This was the animal’s home first, and I had no right to punish him because I chose to put myself in the middle of an ecosystem in which I have no natural part to play.
So my eventual solution was to stop letting the cats go out all together. I built them big fenced catteries, as I’d done at other locations. After all, the domestic cat is not a native of North America; its ancestors are originally from North Africa. It doesn’t belong here.
I also made a promise to Big Snake in the Sky that I would never again intentionally kill one of His (or Her) children. Then, as a symbolic gesture, I put a framed painting of snakes on my wall. Since then, everybody inside and out has been happy.
© 2025 Laura J Merrill.
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