Something strange happened every year at the edge of that prairie, in a place with more cracks in the rock than grass on the ground.
Right before the first hard frost, thousands of snakes went looking for a door in the earth.
She was one of them.
Small. Striped down her back in a neat gold line, the kind of pattern that makes people say oh, just a garter snake, and look away too soon.
She followed the old smell down through a crack in the limestone, deeper than she had ever gone alone, and the crack was already full of company. Bodies curled against bodies. Warmth borrowed and shared. By the time she stopped moving, she could not have said where she ended and the next snake began.
Good.
Winter did not care how many of them there were.
The cold came anyway, pressing down through the stone, and her blood slowed until her whole body felt like something borrowed from someone half asleep. For a few days near the entrance, where the frost reached furthest, her muscles stiffened and would not answer her at all.
She did not panic. A garter snake's body knows how to hold still through a short, hard freeze and come back from it, and hers did exactly that, warming by careful degrees as the days turned.
She waited.
Around her, thousands of others waited too, and that was the whole of the trick. Not one strong snake against the winter. Ten thousand ordinary snakes, leaning on each other's warmth, keeping the cold from ever reaching anyone all the way through.
Weeks passed this way. Then months.
Then one morning the rock above her held a different kind of light.
The first snakes near the entrance felt it before anyone announced it and began to stir, sliding up toward the crack. A ripple went back through the den, snake after snake catching the same warmth, the same idea.
She caught it too.
Up through the limestone, into air that smelled of thawing mud and open sky, and she was not alone for even a single second of it. Around her poured more snakes than she could ever have counted, gold stripes flashing in the new sun, the whole hillside seeming to move.
By afternoon the prairie was hers again, in a way it had not been all winter. She hunted the wet grass for earthworms, and later a slow frog, holding it with a bite carrying just enough venom to still a small, slippery creature and none at all to trouble a person's hand.
By late summer she would not lay eggs the way some snakes did. Her young would arrive already alive, dozens of them, ready from their very first hour to find their own worms and their own warm stones.
And when the cold came again, she would follow the old smell back down through the limestone, into the dark, into the crowd.
Alone is only a season here.
It ends every spring, in a single golden rush, tens of thousands strong, pouring back into the sun together.