Along the lakeshore the woman found shrubs and upon the shrubs bright berries shone in the sun. The woman found the berries bitter, but with a tinge of sweetness, and she ate many of them. She felt her strength returning. She dipped her feet into the lake's frigid water. She ate from the fish of the lake, which she caught from a net she had fashioned from strips of the arroyo willows that surrounded the lake and that grew upon the banks of the river that was the lake's outlet.
The woman drank from the lake, and ate its fish, and the berries on the land around the lake, and she fed her baby, and the snow returned. The woman huddled inside of a house that she had built from the reeds of the willows, bent, and lashed together, and covered with the bark of the incense cedars, and strips from the aspens that she had found growing in groves when the fall came, when the aspens burned yellow amongst the surrounding green pines. Then the snow left, and again the days became warm.
Finally, she sat on the rocks that rested like turtle shells around the lakeshore. She watched her baby's little hands and knees, his feet, as he scrabbled over the rocks and played in the pools of water. The baby's squeals let the woman know how near or far he went, and she knew that he was safe.
The woman's baby yelped—a short scream—and then his wails came shuddering and earnest, and the woman knew he had hurt himself. If he was crying, he would be okay—the woman knew. But from the sound of his wails she knew that it was not merely her attention he wanted.
She rose to her feet and turned toward her son, finding him on his bottom in a well of boulders just a few feet above the lake's surface. He waved his little hand violently.
She saw the snake curled, its head raised, tongue flickering, just a foot away from the boy. There were many of this kind of snake around the shores of the lake, their skin yellow and patterned with brown diamonds. She had never seen one with its head raised like this, with its tongue testing the air-an almost angry look in its two yellow slits for eyes.
She reached to pull her son away, and when she did so, the snake struck, this time missing her and the baby, because the woman jumped back, afraid. She had never seen a snake strike before. The snake's mouth had opened wide—twice as wide as its head. It was so fast, she was not sure at first that she had seen what she had seen, but there the snake still sat, lowering its head now that the humans had backed away.
The baby howled and the woman looked him over. The baby's hand was already swelling. The child wailed and the woman blew a cool breath over the baby's face to calm him. She cooed and sang, but the baby kept whimpering, and he vomited. Soon, the child broke into a sweat, his skin cold no matter how close the woman held him to her own skin. After a while, the boy stopped crying, his breathing labored. Then the baby died.
The woman sat upon the rocks overlooking the lake and cradled her dead boy's body, and she wept. The sun crawled across the sky and went over the mountains behind the woman, to the west, and the mountains cast a shadow over her and her baby's body. Then the dark of night swept over and the stars came out. The woman still sat and held her baby and cried.
When morning came, the woman, still mourning, set her child to drift in the lake. She watched the body bob over the small waves until the water overtook it, and then the body sank.
It was another bright day that brought more wind than the day before, and the eagles turned in the air high above the rocks of the lake. The woman watched the large birds soar. She called to the eagles and asked them to take away the snake that had bit her child.
She asked the eagles to pick up all the snakes that would bite, and carry them far to the west, high up on the mountains, so that they would no longer bite men and women or their children.
Heads bright white against the blue of the lake's morning water, the eagles began to swoop down to the lake for their fish, their food. But the eagles did not scratch their talons against the water's surface, angling out the trout that swam toward the surface for the flies and mosquitoes that had not yet lifted to the air in the morning's cool. Instead, the eagles dove for the rocks and came up gripping snakes. They carried snakes away from the shores of the lake.
They carried the snakes far to the west, to the high mountains, where the trees grew very sparse. There, the eagles dropped the snakes. Some of the eagles ate, but many of them they did not, and thus many snakes got away. The snakes that survived crawled into the crevices between the rocks that long ago had been carved by heavy snow and ice. And because the snakes lived in the crevices of the rocks, and they had to come out to hunt for lizards and mice that were their food, they gathered rocks about their tails. The rocks clung to their tails, and whenever a large animal came too close to the snakes, the snakes shook their tails, and made a rattling noise with the stones that clung to them.
That is why there are no poisonous snakes upon the shores of the lake.