A rattlesnake recently crashed my cousin Greg’s wedding in Sacramento.

Just before friends and family arrived, the uninvited, poisonous guest made her appearance. Greg told me that the snake, a baby, had been tossed over the edge of the property. He promised that she would return.

Baby rattlesnakes can inflict some serious damage. They release all their venom when they bite.

I told my sister, Rachel, what was going on.

“See those little kids playing over there?” I asked her, nodding in the general direction of a hammock hanging between two trees. “That’s where they found the snake.”

Rachel knew what I was getting at.

“Think we’ll get to see a rattlesnake bite one of these kids?” I asked her.

“Chances are probably pretty good, right?”

“One would think,” I said, “and where there’s one …”

Rachel smiled, her eyes searching the area around the hammock. She nodded ever so slightly. We were on the same page: One person’s tragedy is another’s schadenfreude.

When we were young, our parents took us on a trip around the American West. On a hike in the Rocky Mountains I stopped at the lip of a natural spring to look at a beautiful snake swimming with elegance and grace, with purpose but not urgency.

As the snake approached the brim of the rocky bowl I picked her up, at which point our guide lost his mind. He grabbed the snake from my hand and, in the same motion, dispatched her into the woods many yards away.

She was a copperhead and extremely poisonous, the guide said. I’ll never forget the way he fucked with that snake. I knew then that it was bad karma to fuck with a snake.

At Greg’s wedding reception I reminded Rachel about the copperhead incident, which she remembered differently. Rachel insisted that she was the one who’d reached for the snake in the Rocky Mountains.

I knew her memory was unreliable when I had to remind her that, shortly after that family vacation, I asked our parents to hire a herpetologist to bring a bunch of snakes to my birthday party. I’d obviously been robbed of something in the Rocky Mountains.

Not long after that I found a garter snake in our yard. I kept her as a pet and named her Striker, after the erstwhile North American Soccer League’s Fort Lauderdale franchise.

A few days after Greg’s wedding I met my friend Geordie in Sonoma for dinner. He told me that, not too long ago, his wife, Mieko, called him at work after finding two rattlesnakes in their kitchen, one of which she bravely removed with a shovel. The other escaped into the bowels of the house.

Geordie showed me several rattles from snakes he’d killed with a shovel or a .22-caliber rifle.

That night, at the Jack London Lodge in Glen Ellen, I watched an episode of MASH during which a character called Cowboy told Hawkeye that he could “shoot the eyes out of a rattlesnake from 50 yards at a full gallop.”

Bullshit, I thought.

If I had been a character in that episode I would have told Cowboy, “It’s bad karma to fuck with a snake, Cowboy.”

The next day I visited Jack London State Historic Park. The place was mobbed with teenagers on a field trip. At first they were ruining my experience. Then I saw the signs along the trails, one of which read:

Rattlesnakes may be found in this area. They are important members of the natural community. They will not attack, but if disturbed or cornered, they will defend themselves. Give them distance and respect.

Another sign read:

Mountain lions are important members of the natural community and may be found in this area. Although these animals are seldom seen, they are unpredictable and have been known to attack without warning.

Keep children close, as mountain lions seem to be especially drawn to them. Avoid hiking alone. Make plenty of noise while you hike so as to reduce the chances of surprising a lion.

Geordie had mentioned meeting a man whose wife had been killed by a mountain lion. I asked if she’d been killed 15 years ago and if she’d be about 55 today had she survived. He said that sounded about right. I told him I thought we were talking about Barbara Schoener, whose death in 1994 was chronicled in David Baron’s fascinating book The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature.

The signs were there for a reason.

Keep children close, as mountain lions seem to be especially drawn to them. Avoid hiking alone. Make plenty of noise while you hike so as to reduce the chances of surprising a lion.

The teens on the field trip to Jack London State Historic Park were anything but quiet. And parents who had obviously not read the signs were letting even younger children wander ahead of them.

I waited patiently, but none of the children was taken by a mountain lion or bitten by a rattlesnake.

Again, I’d been robbed of something in the American West.

Google Alerts let me know when there’s been a successful animal-on-human attack somewhere in the world.

Successful means that the animal escaped without injury and that the human did not.

I suppose for now that this will have to do.

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