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Three and a half years ago I was bitten by a rattlesnake. Confined to bed and wheelchair, I wrote to find some meaning in the trauma. The initial description of what happened was published in the Star's Accent section on Sept. 21, 2003, just weeks after the bite. The response surprised me; that article struck a nerve in the psyche of desert dwellers. I decided to go deeper with the story, to follow the writing wherever it took me — no matter how circuitous, difficult, or sometimes comic, the path. The result is "Zero at the Bone," which begins with the snakebite in Tucson in my front yard, but then travels a journey in which I learn about snakes, the desert and myself. Those reflections, woven together, grew into a series of serpentine vignettes, some passages of which you will find excerpted here.

— Erec Toso, teaching adviser and director of the Southern Arizona Writing Project at the University of Arizona

From Chapter 3: Darkness and Silence

As I stepped forward through the dark, sound muffled by the thick blanket of air, scent stifled by rising vapors, vibrations dampened by soil saturated and loose, a rattlesnake tasted the air with its heat-sensing pits and its delicate tongue.

I walked in a cottony somnolence beneath the arbor of wild, untrimmed trees. The branches wept drops, bent low to the ground with their weight of water, and brushed my brow, an attempt to rouse my sleeping soul. But I did not heed them. I was swimming in a stream of noise and anxiety that was telling me how much I had to do the next morning, how worried I was about it going well, how much I resented having to put it all together and put my introverted self in front of so many people. I might as well have been sleepwalking.

I can only imagine the sequence of events that unfolded as I shuffled blindly forward in the dark. The snake, its venom sacs full of expectation, turned to flee as the gap between us closed. Unable to escape, the snake likely turned again and prepared to rattle a threat, to ward off the approach of a bone-crushing creature, but it was too late for flight, too late for threats, as my foot fell very near the snake's body.

No one can know how a snake perceives the world, what it sees from eyes that have never blinked, how it can wait coiled for days next to a mouse trail, alert as a samurai, still as stone, for a rodent that may or may not pass within striking range.

What the snake felt or thought is beyond the grasp of my imagination, but its actions were as clear and defined as blueprints. As I walked toward the light of the front porch of our house, a rattlesnake struck the side of my left foot; venom glands on the snake compressed, sending venom through the delicate ducts and into the hollow, syringelike fangs, which had extended beyond the protective fang sheaths. The snake had likely disarticulated its jaw in order to extend the curved fangs outward. The fangs, between one-half and three-quarters of an inch long, then penetrated my skin and sank deep into the soft tissue on the outside of my arch. Venom then passed almost instantaneously through the discharge orifice into the muscle of my foot.

If I had been wearing boots, carrying a simple light, or even just tapping the ground with a walking stick, I might have heard a faint "tick" as fangs struck something inanimate, leaving a harmless stain, or I might have seen him ahead and then stepped aside to admire the pattern of rhomboid scales, or I might have just startled my trespassing neighbor. If . . . then I would have sidestepped injury, would have continued the uninterrupted trajectory of my life. But he and I crossed paths in the shadows. Like colliding pinballs, each of us was knocked off course and sent spinning onto another, this one new, untraveled, unforeseen.

I froze, wondering what had just happened, and tried desperately to divert the boys from whatever it was beneath me. My thick foot, hungry heart, worried bones, and softening gut — all this ephemeral assembly of cells, chemistry, distortions of reality, and electrical impulse — all became subjects to sudden harm. As sophisticated as a syringe, the delivery system did its work. Then the snake rattled a dry leaves whir.

From Chapter 22: Beneath the New Moon

One Saturday a little before I would be able to return to work, I decided to clean out a pack rat nest. The pack rats had taken over a small abandoned chicken coop in the backyard and filled it with spiny branches of cholla, prickly pears and, their favorite delicacy, mesquite beans. The pile was almost three feet high and filled two fifty-gallon garbage cans.

Now cleaning out a pack rat midden is not only unpleasant because of all the spines that penetrate the thickest of work gloves and the acrid stench of rat urine, but is dangerous. Rat middens attract mice, and mouse feces can carry hantavirus, a potentially fatal flulike respiratory infection. The dust from the rat turds rose from the cavity of the garbage can after I emptied each shovelful.

I had put it off too long and decided to take my chances. I wore a dust mask, long sleeves, and heavy boots. I spent the morning shoveling, hauling, sweeping, lining the shed with hardware cloth, and setting traps. This was war.

Pack rats can get into cars and eat the insulation off wires. In fact, they can even get into your dreams. In houses, they can do serious damage to electrical systems, insulation, clothes closets, boot barns, recliners, TVs, swamp coolers, cordless tools, corded tools, sex toys, and masonry. If you have it, they will get it, and either take it, pee on it, or wreck it. If you don't hate pack rats, or wood rats, or trader rats, or rats by any number of aliases by now, you are probably dead or living in a bubble at the bottom of the ocean. They had already eaten the wiring out of the dryer, meaning I had to disassemble it to trace and splice the stub of brown wire with the other end of the brown wire, the white with the white, the blue with the blue, and so on, all the while sprawled out on a carpet of pencil cholla branches and other spines that the rats had hoarded and stacked as a protective barrier. They glued the whole mess together with urine. It was nasty work, for which there will be no forgiveness.

A repair service guy refused to even consider the job, citing reasons I have already mentioned plus a heart condition that forbade him from secondhand talk about the evil creatures.

That night, my first night out in months, Megan and I went to a party and stayed late. She wore some sexy sequins, I tight pants and a bola tie, official neckware of all Arizona cripples. It was my debutant ball, after all, and I was to debut with style, now that de butt had gone down a bit. I had not been out after ten o'clock since August, a full three months. Wine, bright lights, music, and feisty conversation had all helped distract me from the pain in my foot. The women, they were gallant, chivalrous, and witty. The men, lovely and polite. When we returned and were walking from the car to the house along our desert path, I looked at the moon and thought unspeakably lust-filled thoughts. Megan, being more the practical type, had remembered the flashlight, and had given it to me so that I could scan the ground in front us, making it safe for innocent pedestrians, hapless partygoers.

It was a cool night and, to my mind, well past rattlesnake season. Plus there were no pack rats now; I thought snakes would be out where the action was. By now they should have at least found a den and, after a final meal of evicted pack rat, bunked down with a mate or small group of snakes for the winter; so I wasn't watching as much as one might expect me to watch.

With a jerk, Megan grabbed my elbow, gasped, and pointed at a rattlesnake curled up on one side of the trail. It blended in with the ground and had settled itself into a circle of mounded sand. It looked comfortable, harmless, benign.

I wanted to talk to the snake, to direct it to the backyard where my nemeses were regrouping for a counterassault. I wanted to give it half the backyard and draw a line in the sand that it could not cross under any circumstances. I wanted to lead it to the promised land, where pack rats flowed like honey. Of course I could do no such thing.

I collected my garbage can and snake tongs and captured the snake after calling the fire department to come pick it up. Reaching for the snake forced me to overcome some pretty fierce visceral memory, but the snake did not struggle. Instead it looked straight at me, wondering why I was disturbing it, flicking its delicate tongue, catching the scent of Red Tail ale mixed with human fear and regret. It was time to rest, to sleep, not struggle or hunt.

That snake could have lived with me if I had no children, had no obligation to remove all unnecessary risk to their well-being. If I lived alone, I would make a pact with the snake to be constantly aware, to step lightly, to join forces against the rats.

It wasn't going to happen tonight, though. Instead of rattlesnakes, we will have rats. Humans are selecting out those species we fear and creating habitat for those that they hunt. We are moving toward a world of rats and away from a world of rattlesnakes, mountain lions, bears, bighorn sheep, pinacate beetles, spadefoot toads, and even the poster-child creatures like native songbirds and Arizona sycamore. We have messed things up big time. All this made picking up the snake that much harder. I wish it was simpler. Nothing is simple.

I thought my heart was going to break as I stood in the parking lot waiting for Rural Metro to come and haul the snake to an almost certain death in a new territory at such a sensitive time of year.

The lights of the large truck bent around the curve, tracing the contour of our driveway before swinging toward me, headlights growing as they shone straight into my eyes. From behind the blinding glare, the driver emerged from the big diesel rig. He left it running as he stepped down, grabbed his snake box, a small tackle box, his snake tongs, and stepped forward into the light.

As he approached, he looked at me with some recognition.

"Aren't you the guy?"

"Yup."

"Man, I've been an EMT for over twelve years and I was here that night. Worst bite I've ever seen."

I just nodded.

"So you've got another one," he asked, looking into the shadowy void of the drum.

I nodded again with some resignation.

"You must hate these things," he went on, aiming his flashlight into the can before grabbing the snake hard with his tongs and thrusting it into the small tackle box. He surprised me by slamming the lid shut before the snake's tail was fully inside. I think I saw the tail get pinched by the lid, but I wasn't sure.

"No, not really. I think about them a lot though."

He looked at me for a second like I was the strangest man on earth, and then turned back to the truck, throwing the box and tongs onto the passenger seat. "Well, you take care now," he said as he climbed in, his mind already on something else.

From "Zero at the Bone." Copyright 2007 Erec Toso. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press. 224 pages, $15.95 paperback. Available at local bookstores and from www.uapress.arizona.edu.