One of the first things edible plant expert and naturalist Vickie Shufer wanted to show me when I visited her recently outside Virginia Beach, Va., was a rattlesnake skin she had found and mounted on a length of plywood in her living room. “Canebrake,” she said proudly. “Found it one morning just laying there on the ground,” she said. “So fresh I could still smell the snake in it when I picked it up.” Vickie, an enthusiastic and supremely grounded woman who grew up on a Kentucky tobacco farm with seven brothers and sisters in a four-room house, stands exactly five feet tall. The empty snake skin had her beat by a good six inches.

Two days later we were walking in 16 acres of mixed hardwood and pine forest she owns where Shufer grows native plants. She called my attention to various specimens as we encountered them: wild yam, ginger, skullcap, sweet bay magnolia, and rattlesnake root.

Huh? The mention of this last caused me to remember the following: 1) that I was no longer in suburban D.C., 2) that I was wearing low-cut shoes and featherweight nylon trousers, and 3) that I hadn’t been paying much attention as to which of us was in the lead or where I was putting my lightly protected limbs. “Listen, Vickie,” I said, stopping dead, “where’d you say you found that snake skin?” She giggled. “Actually, it was right about here, near as I can tell,” she said, stopping to scan the trees and get her bearings.

Never at a loss for a witty rejoinder, I said, "Oh." And for the rest of the morning, I found myself unwilling and unable to locate or identify so much as a honeysuckle. The only thing I was able to look for after that was a thick-bodied venomous snake, its background color ranging from pinkish to light tan, with darker chevrons across its back and a stripe usually rusty orange or brown running the length of its body.