Have you ever jumped when you thought a root was a snake? Or tripped on a snake that you thought was a root? It's an uneasy feeling either way.

Our friend Jed says, "I like snakes, but I don't like the way they introduce themselves." On Pine Island we see lots of snakes, though mostly black racers when

it's warm, and after a hard summer's rain, Brahminy blind snakes that wiggle on our bedroom floor.

Brahminies are the tiniest snakes in North America. They resemble three-inch strands of black spaghetti, and they're no threat to anyone, mostly living out their blind little lives in flowerpots all over America. But once you see this minute creature with no definable head or tail, it looks positively primeval, and you're afraid to get out bed for fear of stepping on it.

The largest snake in North America also lives on Pine Island. The indigo snake extends eight to 10 feet in length and sometimes stretches across our narrow deserted shell roads. The male members of the species need up to 800 acres for their territory, which explains why these long, black beauties are now a threatened species. Immune to the venom of pit vipers, indigos are the farmer's friend because they swallow rattlers, copperheads and cottonmouths, but

are even-tempered in the presence of humans. Yet many people, imagining all snakes are poisonous, destroy these dignified Floridians whenever they glide into their yard. In my opinion, that's like killing a

devoted watchdog.

The indigo that lives under the pine stump in our front yard is a hearty, friendly fellow with a head as large as my fist. He's at least eight feet long, and his scales glisten with serpentine iridescence. Like all indigos, my friend is not poisonous, nor is he a constrictor. Which is why I doubted the story I heard at Winn-Dixie yesterday.

The tale told of a two-year-old Pine Island girl, who was playing in front of a bird-of-paradise tree. Supposedly, her mother ducked into the house for a second, and when she returned, a frightful sight awaited her: There was her precious child gripped in the coils of a giant blue-black indigo!

I listened with interest while this fantastical tale unwound, but I knew deep down that it was soon to come to an end-tragically, for the endangered snake. The storyteller said that a neighbor, hearing the mother's panicked cries, came running with a machete and killed the snake. When her husband came home from work, the distraught mother told him to dig out the bird-of-paradise tree.

Supposedly, when the husband peered into the cavity where the tree had been, he saw "hundreds of baby indigos." Of course, he killed them, after which he burned the tree.

Here was the tree of paradise and human innocence in the form of a little girl. And then cometh the evil serpent, who needeth no introduction. The biblical elements are there, if a bit askew. (Actually, serpents represent wisdom more than evil in the Bible-consider the reference in Matthew 10:16: "Therefore, be wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.") But here's the rub-indigo snakes do not crush their prey. Mainly, indigos do not go after anything they can't get their mouth around. They bite their prey, then lay their considerable weight upon it. And indigos, unlike king cobras, which are the only snake I know of that make a nest and guard it, do not watch over their young.

Here's what I think happened: The snake was already in the tree, perhaps after a lizard, a rat or another snake. The little girl saw it and may have reached out to touch it. Most likely, being young and uninformed, she was also unafraid. Enter the frightened mom, the machete-bearing neighbor, and you know the rest.

Scientific evidence suggests that humans have no instinctive fear of snakes. That fear is passed down from parent to child; it's true of chimps as well as humans. Both are taught the difference between a root and a snake at a very early age.

I was raised differently. I started out on a farm where snakes were plentiful and rumors about them were few. I should be more afraid of serpents than I am, for when I was five, a farmer slung a freshly killed copperhead around my neck one summer afternoon and asked, "How's that for a necktie?"

I remember that the umber colors of the snake were blended with grayish hues and that it was limp and cool and smooth all at the same time. I also recall that, though it was heavy around my neck, I liked it being there.

The thing that always got me about that dead copperhead was not that Farmer Ray hung it on my neck, but that, for some reason I couldn't figure out, the poor snake had to die. Why? It hadn't done anything to anybody. In my mind, which wasn't fully formed yet, a snake's slinky movement was lovely to look at. Snakes didn't walk, they streaked. They went the way of water, lisping, so to say, from one place to another.

It took me awhile to learn that most people don't see it that way.

But once, to my shame, when I was 18 and an avid hunter, some friends and I went to a place where rattlesnakes were known to be. We killed them for no reason except for the perverse pleasure of it, shooting them one after another as they sunned on a rock.

Yesterday, the sun shone brightly on every leaf. A day to be alive and to celebrate the goodness of Florida. The branches of haw were brimming with rubies of fruit. The sun was shouting, hawks crying. A perfectly lovely, cloudless blue sky. I was repairing our chimney when my wife, Lorry, said, "Look over by the front of the house and you'll see something amazing."

By the slash pine stump, I saw our indigo. A midnight-scaled, massive snake rising from the rusty pine needles around the stump.

And then I saw him again-for he was two, rising and falling in the most delicate dance I have ever seen. The belly scales at the throats of these snakes were the same dull copper as the sun-warmed carpet of pine needles they moved upon. And this mystic dance of the sun was a mating dance.

The two entwined, indigo blues at noon. Black, slack, beautiful bodies wrapped in the warmth of the spring sun. Rising, twining and finally falling back down to the carpet of brown.

I have seen some strange and wonderful things as a naturalist. I've seen eagles kissing, panthers prancing, armadillos swimming (underwater). I saw a salamander migration and a tarantula exodus. But I've never seen anything as wonderful as the mating dance of the indigo. And that is the great wisdom of the serpent-to dauntlessly further its kind when the world is after its head.

Pine Island's Gerald Hausman has written more than 35 books for children and adults, including The Mythology of Horses (with Loretta Hausman).