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People who devote their career to animals—veterinarians, zoologists—are often quite different in temperament from garden-variety animal lovers, taking a flat-footed, unsentimental approach to their subjects, skeptical of any anthropomorphism. My mother worked as a docent at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo for twenty-five years, and has an enormous collection of butterflies she traveled allover the world to catch; my father is a lifelong birdwatcher, getting up before dawn every weekend to search for rare shorebirds at landfills and sewerage plants. And yet neither of my parents is particularly romantic about the animals they love. They love them for perplexingly literal reasons—because they're such fascinating examples of evolution, or because they have "unusual plumage." My parents do not seem especially interested in talking or thinking about what animals are like, what they evoke or suggest, what they mean—all the things that are most compelling to me, the writer in the family.

My favorite novelist, Joy Williams, once said in an interview that the Bible had influenced her as a child because "all those wonderful stories—about snakes and serpents and mysterious seeds and trees—didn't mean what they seemed. They meant some other thing." In Williams's short story "Lu-Lu," the characters do nothing but sit around discussing the meaning of a giant snake (Lu-Lu)—whether she has a soul, how she seems to materialize and dematerialize at will, how she can occupy herself doing nothing. The snake continues to accrue symbolic weight until the story finally ends, hauntingly, with a young woman trying to coax the stoic Lu-Lu into her car: "How do you beckon to something like this, she wondered; something that can change everything, your life?" When I was twelve, my mother gave my father a pet boa constrictor for their anniversary, and never once in all the subsequent years we owned Jaws (we got and named her in 1978) did it occur to me that she could change anything, let alone our lives. We did not discuss her symbolism. We talked about whether she was going to shed her skin soon, or whether she was ready to move up from mice to rats.

So even before I meet Dean Ripa, I think I know what kind of person he will be: another scientist. Though he has no advanced degree, his snake collection is internationally recognized, his research on bushmasters published in herpetological journals.

But then he gives me a copy of his essay, "Confessions of a Gaboon Viper Lover," which appeared in Gary Indiana's 1994 anthology Living with the Animals. It is a paean to Ripa's own late Gaboon viper, Madame Zsa Zsa. "Morphologically, she seems halfway to some unspeakable transformation that may or may not include a human head," he writes. "Her pattern might have been lifted from a Persian carpet," he says, and also suggests skeletons. "One can see into the pattern," a Tanzanian witch priest told Dean, but then declined to say what it was he saw. The snake's design brings to mind "Kandinsky zigzags," the "meretricious skulls" of Georgia O'Keeffe; its face suggests Bosch, or Durer's engraving of The Fall of Man. Seeing the Gaboon viper, Dean writes, "seems largely participatory, on a parallel with perception itself. Like Dali's paranoiac-critical method of the hidden face, there arises that 'magic' effect of audience creation." Watching a Gaboon viper "literally materialize before you from the debris of the forest floor," he concludes, "is perhaps the closest one can ever come among live creatures to the fright of encountering an actual ghost."

I notice that I am feeling slightly in love.

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