It’s been “snake week” here at Sortova Farm.

At least these snakes were outside. My friend Lyle gets them in his house. One morning during breakfast, his son Arlo pointed out that there was a snake curled up by the trash can in the kitchen. The closest we’ve come to that is finding shed skin in the garage. Anyway …

Last Saturday I caught a rather large black rat snake near the garden. The next day there was a similar snake in the barn, and on Monday there was one outside the window at work.

This morning as I was checking e-mail Andrea came and banged on the window of the study. Freya had found a large snake on the road to the barn, and Andrea didn’t recognize it.

It was the largest copperhead I have ever seen.

This snake was at least four feet long, which in itself is big, especially for a copperhead, but he was also very thick, as big as my upper arm.

Now I pride myself on being ecologically minded, and copperheads are the least venomous member of the pit viper family. In fact, no one bitten in North Carolina has ever died from a bite from one. In the past I’ve moved the copperheads I’ve found away from living areas, but then the largest I’d seen before this one was hardly over two feet long.

Anyway, I didn’t want it around the dogs, so I found a stick with a Y branch and went to catch me a copperhead.

I lucked out and got him right behind the head, but he just took off (and broke my stick). Freya gave chase but we called her off it quickly (while we stood little chance of dying from a bite, I wasn’t so sure about the dog). I went to get a bigger stick, but by then I couldn’t find him.

The weird part about the whole thing is that I dreamed about snakes all night. It was a theme: I had many dreams but they all featured snakes. The first one started out with my Mom holding onto a large cottenmouth (don’t ask me why, it was a dream). The funny thing is that the snake in my dream looked a lot like the snake Andrea found on the road. I assume the copperhead was getting ready to shed since it had a very dark color. I didn’t get close enough to see if its eyes were blue.

If I dream about specific numbers, I’m off to Virginia to play the lottery.