Surprise in a Box

I've said before that things don't seem to be going my way. A lot of obstacles show up where none appear to be ahead of time. Maybe it's not as bad as I thought. In a previous blog I mentioned Lynx, a feral cat I take care of. There's a picture of him here. Last winter I made him a shelter out of a cardboard box from Walmart and a cat bed. I put plastic sheeting over it and duct taped it to make it a little weatherproof then put it on the back porch where he could find it about three feet off the ground.

This summer he decided he's domesticated. He uses the front porch now and hardly ever goes on the other one. It's been chilly at night recently, around 55F(12.78C). Last weekend I decided to move the bed to the front porch. When I got to it, the barrier I used to protect it from the rain had blown down. The box had some condensation under the plastic on the top. I reached inside and squeezed the bed some. It felt okay. I picked it up by the top of the door I made in the side and started carrying it around the house. It was kind of heavy, so I was swinging it a little and changed hands.

I put it down on the front porch and showed it to Lnyx, but he wouldn't go in. I tried to talk him into it. It didn't do any good. He would just smell the doorway. Once the tame cat noticed the box, he ran over to it, because he likes boxes. He wouldn't go in either. That's when I saw the tail end of the snake that was inside it along the bottom of the doorway. The bed had a pattern on it that made it harder to spot, even though they were different colors. The snake wasn't moving much. It seemed to be stuck.

I ended up having to take the box apart to kill it. Mammals rule! What appeared to have happened was the duct tape I put around the doorway so Lynx wouldn't get cut on the sharp edges pulled away from one side of the doorway when I was carrying it and swinging it and changing hands. Somehow in all the movement the snake landed on the sticky side of the duct tape along the side of the doorway. My hand was along the top of the doorway during all that.

It wasn't a baby but was still pretty small and looked like a rattlesnake with no rattles. After looking at snakes online, I thought it seemed like a cross between a diamond-backed copperhead and a black king snake. I've seen plain copperheads and king snakes in the yard but no rattlesnakes. I really can only guess. I'm not sure copperheads and king snakes date each other.

For me not to get bitten, everything had to work out just right. It didn't get me when I put my hand in the box. The tape had to come apart in the right spot. It had to be sticky enough to hold a snake, when most of the tape on the box was brittle and no more good. The snake had to be the right size to get stuck. It had to land in the exactly right spot. It had to get stuck at all and not merely jostled around. The head had to get stuck and the tail be free. There was a lot going on so I didn't get bitten at the time or later. Same for the cats.

A few days before that, I checked the weather on the Weather Channel. I have Directv. The weather guide takes a while to load. While I was waiting, there was a show about snakes on. I saw two people who had been bitten on the hand. It's copperhead season here. They've been running around having babies and stuff. I thought of that while I was watching it and turned it off and prayed for protection from snakes and for the snakes to be turned aside, etc. Maybe things aren't as bad as I thought. Maybe there's a purpose in all this. The devil set a good trap. Being three feet off the ground, I thought about snakes but didn't think one was likely to be in the box at that height. God watched out for me with the snake and turned it aside and trapped it in just the right way. Preventive prayer works. Even the traps can be turned backward and trap themselves. Psalm 91.