But Rikki-Tikki-Matilda would not shut up. Instead, she marched straight down to the garden, hackles rising around her neck and shoulders, bob tail wriggling, eyes like hot coals, puffed up her speckled chest and let out a string of rrrrr rruff ruff RUFF RUFF RUFFs. The lady of the house had had it now, and she came stomping down in her pajamas to tell Rikki-Tikki-Matilda to be quiet once and for all goddammit, until she saw the blue heeler dog bounding all around something that stopped her in her tracks— a six-foot-long, furiously rattling, seething-mad, coiled-up, pissed-off rattlesnake. Rikki-Tikki-Matilda was keeping just out of reach of its stroke, looking back at the lady of the house as if to say, See, I told you so.

The lady of the house began yelling for the man of the house, “Dennis, hurry! Rattlesnake! It's a huge one!”

“You are going to the rubbish heap now, you miserable rattlesnake. Fight, viper!” growled Rikki-Tikki-Matilda. “The big man has gone for his gun! Fight!"

When the man of the house shot the rattlesnake dead, that set all the hens in the henhouse singing, and the usually-cranky geese jigging, for the rattlesnake used to sleep in their nests during the heat of the day and eat their babies. When Rikki-Tikki-Matilda got to the house, J. and C. and their mother (the lady of the house looked very white still, for she had been fainting) and Dennis came out and apologized profusely to the blue heeler dog for telling her to shut up her barking. Dennis gave the rattlesnake rattlers to 8-year-old C., who proclaimed that he would take them to school for show-and-tell. And he hung what was left of the mean old snake on the fence, which caused Rikki-Tikki-Matilda to glower and growl at the carcass the rest of the day.

And that night Rikki-Tikki-Matilda ate all that was given her till she could eat no more, and went to bed on her plush doggie bed in the master bedroom, where the lady of the house saw her when she came to look late at night. "She was trying to tell us there was a big rattlesnake in the garden," she said to her husband. “And I wouldn’t listen to her. Just think, the children might have been bitten when they went out to play!” She shuddered. “God, I hate rattlesnake season. This is the one thing I can’t stand about New Mexico. I despise those awful things."

Rikki-Tikki-Matilda woke up with a jump, for the blue-heeler dogs are light sleepers. "Oh, it's you," said she. "What are you bothering for? The rattlesnake is dead. And if there are more, I'm here." Rikki-Tikki-Matilda had a right to be proud of herself. But she did not grow too proud, and she keeps the garden as a blue-heeler dog should keep it, with tooth and jump and spring and growl, and the lady of the house worries a little less about her children stumbling upon a rattlesnake while playing outside as long as Rikki-Tikki-Matilda-the-tenacious-heeler is around.

Flickr photo (rattlesnake) by: treeliner