Ish is bitten by a rattlesnake and survives the plague

Ish is bitten by a rattlesnake and survives the plague in a sequence that turns an ordinary solitary excursion into the threshold of the Great Disaster. Alone in a mountain cabin, he treats the bite with limited equipment while a rapidly spreading epidemic makes other people afraid to approach him. His eventual recovery leaves him with a tentative explanation: the new disease and the snake venom may have counteracted one another. The episode is also decisive because Ish encounters the catastrophe without witnessing the mass deaths that might have overwhelmed him, and so begins his search for what remains of human society with an unusual degree of distance from its collapse.

The Bite and Ish’s Response

While climbing toward a rock ledge, Ish feels a snake bite his hand. He recognizes the danger but acts methodically rather than killing the animal or abandoning his work. He retrieves his hammer and continues down the rough trail, then binds his wrist with a handkerchief twisted around a twig. He knows that exertion could accelerate his heartbeat and the circulation of venom, so he avoids hurrying even as fear makes his heart pound.

At the cabin, Ish loosens and retightens the improvised tourniquet according to what he has read, then finds the snake-bite kit he should have brought with him. He follows its directions and uses the kit’s suction pump. The hammer, which he has carried down from the ledge, falls handle-up when he enters and rocks before coming to rest. His practical response is imperfect, but it gives the scene its immediate shape: Ish is alone, relying on remembered instructions, improvised materials, and the supplies in his cabin.

Initially, he treats the bite as a manageable setback. He believes that he can rest for a few days with food and water, then drive to Johnson’s ranch once the swelling subsides. He makes coffee despite having little appetite and becomes sleepy. His confidence rests partly on his youth and health, and partly on the expectation that help or ordinary life will remain within reach. Neither assumption survives the night unchanged.

Isolation During the Epidemic

Ish wakes to find two men in city clothes at the open cabin door. He tells them he is sick, and their alarm turns to panic; they flee without offering help, leaving the door open and driving away. At first, Ish cannot understand why they have abandoned him. By dawn, his hand is swollen and painful, but he is otherwise well enough to make coffee and oatmeal. He still hopes that someone else will arrive and prove more willing to help.

As his condition worsens, the uncertainty becomes frightening. Weak and confined to bed, he writes a note with his left hand to leave a record of what has happened. He signs it only Ish: writing out Isherwood Williams would take too much effort, and the shorter name is the one by which everyone knows him. Cars pass on the road without stopping, and his calls do not carry to them. His isolation is not merely a consequence of being alone in the mountains; the people who might have helped are themselves frightened and moving through a crisis they do not understand.

During the night, Ish suffers from fever, chills, coughing, and a rash. He does not know whether these symptoms belong to the snakebite or to another illness. The distinction becomes more important as he reads reports of a new disease spreading through population centers around the world. The newspaper describes a disease that has outrun quarantine, with possible origins ranging from an animal reservoir to a new microorganism or a laboratory release. Its accounts also describe doctors and nurses remaining at their posts, emergency handling of food and services, and regulations requiring immediate mass burials. The scale of the epidemic makes the two visitors’ flight newly intelligible: they had feared that the disease had reached them, too.

Recovery and Recognition

When Ish wakes after the worst of the illness, both the fever and the condition of his hand seem to have improved. The bite has receded to local soreness, and his head is clear. He considers the simplest explanation available to him: he had contracted the new disease, and it had somehow fought with the venom in his blood, one counteracting the other. The narrative presents this as Ish’s reasoning, not as a medically established account of how he survived. He has no proof that the illnesses neutralized each other, but their simultaneous retreat gives him a way to understand why he is still alive.

His recovery restores enough strength for him to leave the cabin. He takes his notebooks and camera, then, almost compulsively, brings the hammer as well. He drives slowly, using his injured hand as little as possible. The objects he chooses register both his former purposes and the beginning of new ones: the notebooks and camera belong to the work he had been pursuing, while the hammer remains a practical possession that he cannot quite leave behind.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The episode is Ish’s first close encounter with the epidemic as a social event rather than a private medical emergency. The frightened men and the passing cars initially appear inexplicable; knowledge of the outbreak later changes their actions into evidence of a wider catastrophe. In this way, Ish learns about the Great Disaster through absences and interrupted expectations: help does not arrive, traffic does not stop, and the ordinary assurances of a populated world no longer hold.

His survival also shapes the position from which he confronts what follows. Ish later recognizes that he did not endure the worst shock of seeing his family and other people die around him. His separation from those deaths does not mean that the catastrophe has left him untouched, but it does spare him one form of direct trauma. He is therefore able to investigate whether civilization and humanity have truly disappeared instead of immediately surrendering to that conclusion.

The episode also anticipates the distinction Ish later draws between the Great Disaster itself and the secondary dangers that threaten those who survive it. The epidemic and the bite are intertwined in his own account of survival, but recovery does not restore the protections of organized society. The scene makes survival contingent: Ish has shelter, food, a treatment kit, and enough knowledge to respond, yet he remains vulnerable to illness, isolation, and chance. His survival is not a victory over the new world so much as the narrow opening through which he enters it.