The snake head is a curious creature. It is a fish, a whole family of them, all with unsettling appearances and teeth that look and act like rusted steel traps, and have a rare, but known history of confrontations with humans. The Northern species, in particular, is one that I have slowly grown to fear; the young have the ability to climb out of water and survive for a few hours, or even a few days at most, in search of a new pond to live in. And perhaps the most frightening thing out of them: it, along with its relatives, are all native to the waters in and around the arboreal forest in Russia. The Northern snake head is invasive, and clearly a threat. So how was it that I grew up having to tend to them for almost twelve years?
Almost entirely, my father. For 25 years, he helped conserve the aquatic nature of Louisiana and the not-too-distant Gulf of Mexico, on behalf of the Audubon Institute. With a particular interest in fish, he spent the following 15 years as one of the top curators of the Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans, also run by Audubon. Having seen his fair share of fish and other animals from around the world, he decided to make an entrepreneurship of sorts: raising fish for slaughter and selling to the local fish market in our hometown. At the time, the idea was not too unknown, just simply a situation in which the risks were too great to challenge. When he bought the house I grew up in, he unknowingly set up shop in snake head territory as well. When a flood trapped two of those things in our backyard, he claimed not to have any choice but to puppeteer the fish to death, and sell whatever he could to the fish market. Surprisingly, he made a good amount of money from it.
When I was born in 1989, he was already something of a local businessman, somehow still able to juggle this job with his other job at the aquarium. My parents and I were a relatively wealthy family, and I always felt uneasy about it. The means at how we were wealthy made me question my father’s intentions with us, and quite possibly the neighborhood. The process was simple: just corral the fish that get lost in the floodwaters into a rudimentary “pen” to trap them in and feed algae. Through a rather complex explanation my father gave me, apparently the more algae they eat, along with other fish and meat from the butcher shop, as well as accidental consumption of mud and the sweet water they were in, made their meat sweet as well. In fact, I have tried that meat before. It tastes like honey. As a result I was not surprised when the market told us that these products were worth their weight in gold.
I started work when I was nine years old. At that point, my old man had already brought in some other species of fish to farm, but almost always our most profitable animals were the snake heads. It was my job to check in on the pens every morning and every night, to make sure that nothing man-made or natural tried to harm the fish.
It was an unholy task. Many times the vibrations of my shoes walking on the wooden bridge overlooking the pens got the fish extremely riled up. They would oftentimes try and attack one of the supports that held it up, actually damaging it in the process, and ultimately the bridge was deemed rickety and unstable by my father. Over the years, I was given different tasks as I got older. At first it was to check for any stray fish that wound up in the pens, then it was to retrieve any fish that ended up dying after stuffing themselves to death for my father to prepare for the market, and ultimately to feed the fish themselves, most of the time up close and personal. I never complained when I was given that last task, at first. But as time grew on, I soon had reason to.
Each batch of fish, snake heads especially, began to grow bitter throughout the years. At first they were just motionless in the water, watching me as I tossed the food into the water(feeding the fish required to go into the pen itself, after the bridge was rendered unusable). Both parties involved, the fish and I, were well aware of each other’s presence. I was always sure to not make any sudden moves because of this, but even then I fear that there was something unsettling going on. My father was also stared at by his prizes, but was careless in trying to stop anything from escalating further. After all, he had more experience in this business than I did, surely he’s got to be doing something right. Right?
Unfortunately, he wasn’t doing enough to prevent anything bad from happening. I learned this the terrifying way one afternoon when I went into the water with a tiny paper cut on my finger. It was not flowing blood, but that somehow still attracted a much smaller fish to my hand. A young bowfin, about the size of my forearm, began to nip at the affected area, and eventually opened up the wound further, to the point where I was bleeding again. Then it chomped down on my hand. When I realized what had happened, I quickly pulled myself out of the water to tend to the wound, all the while the rest of the fish were quickly gathering to the point where I had climbed out of the water, waiting for me to come back in. My father had no explanation for this. The closest thing he could think of was some sort of deficiency in the animals that caused them to attack me. It was like teething, but instead the fish needed something to obtain nutrients from. I knew that was not true. These fish were always given the proper amount of nutrients and then some, as such, this was no deficiency, nor was it an accident. It was almost as if the fish had now begun to outright hate me. My suspicions were proven correct, when a few days later I managed to find a fresh duck corpse inside the pen. Surprisingly, there were almost no bites taken out of it, so that means that these fish quite possibly murdered something out of spite, instead of killing and eating it out of hunger. And unfortunately for me and my father, this was only the beginning.
As the summer began, the fish were now extremely frenzied, regardless of what was happening. The rains were not much help either. Floodwaters often made for a rather opportunistic way to escape the pen, and my father often found them swimming as fast as they can into the neighboring swamp. Getting them back into the pen was impossible to do up close now. Instead he had to lead them to it with an old flagpole with a decoy plastic fish tied to it. It seemed to work every time, but I was scared nonetheless. Around the autumn and winter months, when the temperature cooled, the fish slowed down and actually left us alone, a byproduct of their biological clocks. This process continued for three years until the storm of the century happened.
Then it became extremely dangerous for the both of us.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, our entire village was uprooted. Houses appearing as if they all sat on land mines, fences and roofs strung up on the trees. Miraculously, no one was killed in our village, not even my dad. It meant that we had endured the absolute worst. It now meant that we had to check up on the fish. He called up some neighbors to scout the area for the animals, because they weren’t deemed harmless anymore by him. It was an eight-person effort, consisting of dad, me, and six other people, all of whom I have known for years. It was centered around our property, because if there was a place that the fish could still be hiding, it would be near the now-submerged bridge behind our house. The skies were very dark, and it began raining at least an hour into the search. The hurricane was over, but something just as awful had begun.
The floodwaters began to recede by a tiny amount, but that meant that things were starting to go back to normal. The search party split up to cover more water, each group on one dinghy. I already knew that we were attracting those animals; the vibrations caused by the motor were met with unseen animals darting towards us. My father turned off the motor and we both sat in silence. We may have been attracting the fish, but we also needed to grab them safely as well. A worked-up snake head can be dangerous for your hands. I just sat there listening for any sounds in the water, as did my father. We both sat in that dinghy, in freezing cold weather, for about two hours. When the rains stopped at around 7:30, I began to notice something squiggly in the water. A water moccasin, I thought, and backed up out of instinct. But as it got closer to us, I realized something unusual about it: it was not moving on its own at all, but rather by a miniature current. When I got to see it In full detail, my heart stopped: the snake was essentially hollowed out, crushed by countless teeth of many predatory fish. Our fish.
I quickly retreated to the front of the dinghy in fear. My father, investigating what I just saw, was also startled by the snake remains. He was just about ready to phone in the other searchers to pack their things, when he noticed a ripple in the water, right next to the dinghy. A bubble had been blown, right next to us, and it took no time at all realizing where the snake heads were: directly on the ground, partially hidden by the watercraft. As he turned on the motors to get away from this spot, the fish immediately darted upwards, towards the boat, teeth on display. They were trying to incapacitate us.
It wasn’t long before we managed to narrowly escape the fish’s ambush spot, and rendezvous with another boat containing two other men in the search party. His report was just as worse as ours: they’d heard some whimpering, like that of a dog, followed by faint splashes in the water, and then dead silence. One of the men, a tall, 45-year-Old man with stubble and faint black rings under his eyes, possibly from tiredness, wanted to investigate this before my father gave any further instructions. He agreed, stating that the area was currently unsafe for any of us land-dwellers. The man swam, then waded into a flooded attic not twenty feet from our location. We couldn’t hear anything that went on in there, nor could we see. It was now dark outside, and the threat of being fish feed was larger. After ten minutes of no sound, nor any response to any question we asked, we moved our boats into the rather crowded flooded attic. We had to turn on our brightest flashlights just so we could see so much as an inch in front of our faces. And right away, we were met with a tragic sight.
The man was there, face down and his right leg skinned. Again, no bites were taken out him that we could see. Below him we could make out the shape of a dog, lying down on the floor of the submerged house, also left alone. And what surrounded these two poor souls were the fish.
One alligator gar, three pike, two bowfins, and of course, the snake heads, eight strong. And they were all staring right at us, even as we shone down our flashlights on them.
We spent no time speeding our way out of the village. When the floodwaters completely receded, the two of us packed our things and moved to Colorado. I have no idea what happened to those other three members of the search party, because no one else in the area had ever seen or heard from them again after that.
Today, I work as a gardener. At the very least, plants don’t actively try to kill you. My father has now switched jobs and works as a veterinarian for the Denver Zoo, never forgetting his experiences as a defeated entrepreneur. The fate of the fish is somewhat unknown. According to my father, there were several reports of large, carnivorous animals being found dead and floating in the water, most likely victims of the escaped fish. Then in September, a bull shark was found in a landlocked lake and killed, his stomach revealing several snake heads inside him. Several, as in, five, not all. That last bit really gave me a heart attack, especially because since that incident, there have been no traces of snake heads being found in the area. As for the other fish we owned? They were not once found in any way, shape, or form in the area since cleanup was resolved. No scales, no carcasses, no sightings, nothing. There are still reports of many small animals turning up in similar conditions, however, and many of them being reported several miles north of the area.
My dad and I just Bat an eye at these stories. We know that those dead animals are from this particular fish, and given the fact that they’re already native to the region, I don’t think they’re going anywhere anytime soon. Still, whenever I see large, toothy fish near me, I just back away quickly and stare down the thing. My dad has no problem with them, but I do. The threat of another innocent person being murdered by a fish just because we kept them prisoner is something my father has said to be not uncommon. It’s happened once, it can happen again. And I respond by just saying, knowing that we have no such species of fish here, nor are there any ways for them to get here:
“Good fucking riddance.”