A snake in the grass

‘He walked straight past the wolf and picked up the dead garter snake.’ This is the exemplary sentence that young teacher Connie writes out for a good-looking, baseball-loving pupil three grades behind in his studies. ‘Fifteen years old, and thick as a plank,’ the school Principal, Parley Burns considers him. Connie chooses her words to meet what this boy really cares about. The school is in Jewel, a small town in south-west Saskatchewan, and Michael, always happier out-of-doors, really did bring in a snake, to display its beauty. Finding it, Parley killed it with his blackboard-pointer. Unfortunately the best Michael can do with the sentence is: ‘He wakt past the fol and pickt up the ded grtre snake.’ But aloud he is eloquent enough, on the snake’s regular skin-shedding, for instance: ‘[It] tugs and leaves its skin behind, like a woman’s stocking,’ he says, suggesting that on other matters he may not be so backward.