When I was a boy I walked into the desert in spring to search for rattlesnakes. When the sun rose high enough and the winter days were gone the snakes would come up out of the earth and bask upon the heated stones at the foot of the mountains. I loved the snakes and I would search the old places where I had seen them in other years. Cold-blooded, the snakes were sluggish when they first rose from the earth. I used to walk carefully among them, some of the large females four feet long, their bodies thick as a man’s forearm.

I remember searching for the young snakes, the ones that had just recently been born. They were often coiled together, their skins and scales bright in the sun. How old was I, eight or nine, my body thin and lithe as a willow wand. The little rattlesnakes were perhaps a foot long, no more. I would take a forked stick and carefully unwind them from the coiled balls their bodies had made and then I would lean down and pick one or another of the snakes up, holding them just behind their heads. I loved it when their bodies curled around my wrist. I was gentle with them and always careful for I knew the babies were as poisonous as the adults and I didn’t want to get bitten.

I remember one day lying down at the edge of the stone circle where the snakes warmed themselves and there I fell asleep. When I woke an hour later a dozen snakes were curled around my body, one large female lying against my belly, another in the curl of my arm. It took a few minutes for me to unwind myself. I remember not being afraid. If anything, I was in awe that they had trusted me enough to warm themselves against me.

This little story takes me back to my novel Red Dog, Red Dog and the young man, Tom Stark, who is the central character. While Tom is not me and the book is a fiction, I think this is something that he might have done, for the setting of the novel is in the high desert country of my childhood and youth. I think Tom Stark would have liked snakes just as he loved the wasps that visited his bedroom every autumn.

We build our fictions from our lives. Our characters are imagined people in imagined places and their actions create the stories that define us, that tell us who we are. That little boy who lay down and slept among the rattlesnakes in the Okanagan hills was me. It was a long time ago, 1947 or 1948, sixty years ago at least. I remember that country well and though the rattlesnakes of the place are rare now and hard to find, I would still like to go among them if only to be trusted as I once was among such lords of the world.

Red Dog, Red Dog is published in February. Order it from Amazon, Waterstones.com, Play, or from your highstreet bookshop.