After the rain caught me without a tent, after wrestling the food bag six feet off the ground and waking four times to crashes in the undergrowth, I have all but given up on the Cohutta Wilderness. Now a strange snake is stretched across the trail to the car. The snake has been sleeping a dozen yards from the creek, and only his black eyes move as I squat under the hemlocks in the blue dawn. His yellow and green body swells and contracts, swells and contracts, as he tries to warm his muscles enough to slide over the pebbles into the dark woods. This is no copperhead or water moccasin or rattlesnake. His head is round, without the triangular swell of venom glands, so I watch closely as he breathes with his whole body.

What is it about wild things that makes me feel alive? Why this calm that comes at the border of species, breathing the chill air with the sluggish snake? I want to stroke his smooth, freckled skin, feel his flexible, hair-thin spine — now, before he strikes or swims away into the wet morning. But the snake is not enraptured. He is nervous, too numb to flick his tongue, tasting the air, too numb to sense if I am dangerous.

I understand his uncertainty. The tension at the base of my neck. The reptile brain hissing when someone gets close. I've learned to look for signs in the natural world, and this snake blocking the trail with his whole body is enough to change my mind about leaving the woods. I need the quiet of the mountains to hear what's coiled inside me, breathing under my skin.

Teaching science to school groups, I would let the fat black rat snake coil around my arm, tickle the hognose till he turned his white belly up, playing dead in my palms. Over and over, I unwrapped the mottled python from my neck, tugged the corn snake till she pulled her head out of my pocket. I knelt by each cage and talked to the snake inside, my hand descending past the water bowl into the wood chips, stroking the length of the snake before I closed my hand around him and lifted him into the charged silence of the school kids. Thick cords of awe and fear whipped through the air, stroking the snake long before I laid him in the students' cupped hands, the nervous breath of the children breaking the quiet that lay like a fresh skin around each glistening animal. Silence is foreign to us. We have forgotten how to stretch out, stunned by sunlight, on a granite boulder, how to glide between water and sunlight as if our skins were equally made of each. The snake, with his long, grasping body, remembers.

When snakes mate, they thrash the undergrowth, writhing up each other's slender stalks, rubbing nearly all of their white-edged scales against each other. They look desperate for arms. What would they whisper into each other's twisting necks if they had a language as clumsy as ours? They know only motion and pheromones, a dusky violence among dead leaves. I can't pity this corporeal silence. To dance like that, just once, under the rhododendrons! I have stroked those cool, elastic skins, looked into the round, black eyes — think of a piece of sea glass flashing in grains of sand.

Stretch on the floor. Tuck your elbows to your ribs. Loosely cover your ears. This is the body of the snake, except his spine bends like a rubber band and his organs line up single file, left lung, right lung, left kidney, right kidney, alternating down the cold-blooded length of him. Flick your tongue and retrieve it, flick your tongue and retrieve it, touching the back of your mouth, rubbing air particles against the Jacobson's organ. (Of course, you don't have this fluid-filled sac, which detects smells.) Have a friend in hiking boots walk briskly by. Feel how the vibrations shake your stomach. Feel how your neck tenses, how easy it would be to strike.

I first shape-shifted into a snake at a shamanic workshop in Nashville, shuffling around a wood-paneled room with a dozen other students, mostly white, middle-class health professionals — counselors, massage therapists, a neurosurgeon and his young wife. We danced to discover our power animals, circling single file to a drum beat until our consciousness shifted and our movements became decidedly different. The doctor's wife ran howling like a monkey up a metal-backed chair. The shaman crawled into the corner on her hands and knees, nibbling unseen seeds. My arms fell off and my skin glazed over and it was the most natural thing in the world to sway over the gray carpet and coil under the snack table, flicking my tongue, tasting the air as the other animals lumbered by in their clumsy human frames. An outsider would have seen a twenty-nine year old man with glasses and a shaved head hiding under a folding table, but on some cellular level I became the snake — heavy lidded, slow, sensuous. I could have burst with pride at my smooth, black scales.

Body workers speak of cellular memory, memory stored not in our brains but in our living tissues. Heartbreak, fear, anxiety, are physical. Clench your mind shut, but the body remembers. What does the snake remember? When he slips his torn skin, does he leave his fear and pain behind with the scales drying out on the rocks, growing thinner and paler until they are finally dust?

One in six American boys is sexually abused — maybe more, because boys report abuse less often than girls. Boys are trained to be tough, to take care of themselves. Some disassociate, closing the connection between the brain and the body. Repressed memories still swim through the muddy water of the unconscious. The flash of a sharp fin. A glimpse of bared teeth. The barbed fish rising in dark dreams.

Clench your mind shut, but the body remembers.

Until my teens, I was scared to sleep on my stomach. I imagined demons hovering under the spackled ceiling, falling on me with black claws. Lying on my back with my fists clenched and the closet light on, I could fight them off, but face down, I felt vulnerable, my breaths quick and short, the sheet pulled tight across my thin body. In my Baptist family, were demons an acceptable way to talk about abuse? Who did I expect to descend in the darkness with hot, sick breath?

This is the burden of recovered memories. If I unearth one dark shard of my childhood, what remains buried? What monsters still breathe under my bed? Tug one frayed string, and a life unravels. I was three, at a neighbor's house, my hair blonde as corn silk. I still feel him at the base of my spine, like reaching into a cardboard box full of wet leaves, something sticky and soft that gets under your fingernails, where you can't scrub it out.

When I dance the snake, I quit thinking. I feel. His midnight skin covers mine. His split tongue slips between my lips and flicks the air. His long muscles overflow my slender frame, trailing across the carpet, turning golden in the morning sun. The snake crawls into the corners, investigates the closets. He would inch my heavy body up the doorframe if he could, stretch out under the ivory washing machine, squeeze between the linoleum and the plywood. He loves liminal zones, in-between places — a perfect guide to the unconscious, with its crevices and lost gods.

The snake is the master of forgotten spaces.

But there are places in my body I do not want to go.

Boas and pythons retain vestigial legs, small lumps of bone with which males grasp females during sex. After a hundred million years of evolution, these spurs linger under the snake's ropy muscles. Living fossils, a history too deep to shed.

All my life I've been afraid of men. I've trained in Tae Kwon Do, Jiu-Jitsu, Muay Thai, boxing, stick fighting, but even my roommate, a gentle, muscled writer, makes me nervous. A quick inventory shows the results. I've wrenched my shoulder grappling, pulled my neck sparring, sprained my lower back, torn my chest twice on the bench press. I've sustained more injuries learning to protect myself than I would in a bar brawl. Under these new muscles the blonde boy in the red Falcons jersey is still waiting for the man to come back. But how would I recognize him? Except for a rough brown beard, I can't remember his face.

On the Mexican island of Santa Catalina lives a rattlesnake with no rattles. In the coastal desert, among saguaro and ocotillo, Crotalus cataleninsis outgrew its warning system but kept the venom, kept its mottled gray skin, which perfectly matches the patchwork of desert stones. I worry about God's sense of humor. A heat seeking missile coiled under the creosote. The serpent in a garden of thorns, his body coiled sensuously around what fruit?

In Greek shrines to the god Aesclepius, patients slept in dormitories where non-venomous snakes slithered across earthen floors. Imagine lying in the dark while your fever breaks. Cool, dry scales slide over your ankle. A forked tongue flicks the hollow behind your knee. Snakes crawl under the sheets, into your dreams, and this is a good thing, for the snake is the god's familiar. The dream snake is Aesclepius himself, and his bite heals. The temple altar is littered with body parts rendered in clay — earthen ears, kiln-fired hands — offerings to the god from patients who've recovered. In the morning you tell your dreams to the priest, and he diagnoses you based on the images, prescribing herbs and mineral baths, an ancient combination of psychology, herbal medicine, and divination by snakes.

After he raped me, he smoked a cigarette. That's all I remember, except bits and body parts: oil-stained blue jeans, a dirty T-shirt with sweat rings under the arms, the flash of a garage door, white in the Southern sun. I'm not sure I recall even this much correctly, but my body remembers.

I am thirty, with an energy healer slowly moving her hands over my chest, when I connect the dots — my childhood shock and fear and the cigarette he smoked and the headaches I get in cloudy bars. In my dream state on the massage table, the liminal zone between waking and sleeping, I see his smoldering cigarette again, the lit end blood red, the smoke curling thick and black over my lungs, and I am sobbing, my whole body coiling and uncoiling on the lavender sheets.

As a shamanic healer, sometimes I pull twisting snakes out of my patients' bodies. I've extracted energy in the shape of beetles, wasps, nails, and saw blades, but the spirit snakes worry me the most. Are these energetic intrusions really spirit snakes, or does the energy leaving my client's bodies simply resemble reptiles? Am I extracting lethargy, depression, sluggishness? Are these patients cold-blooded, coiled, ready to strike? The snakes I pull out of their organs feel slick and ugly, nothing like the gentle black snake who swims up when I close my eyes. The patients sigh and soften when the energy leaves them. The snakes, too, seem relieved, slipping into the permanent dusk beyond the massage table, the dark edges of the unconscious, with a final flourish of their tails.

Most full moons I drive four hours through the piedmont, with its loblolly pines, into the mountains of North Georgia, where Muskogee elder Tom Blue Wolf leads a sweat lodge. All afternoon we chop wood, cover the willow-framed hut with wool blankets, twist pinches of tobacco in bright squares of cloth to make prayer ties, and heat the stones in a sacred fire. I'm writing this essay when the full moon comes around. Driving to Tom's farm, I think of the snake and the dark story coiled beneath it. It would be easier to write about the slim green snake drinking from the creek in Cades Cove, the gleaming coils of the Milky Way, the cosmic snake swallowing its own tail, without sucking the venom from my childhood. I couldn't find the words twenty seven years ago, and I'm still scared to tell this story. But I am praying, which is what you do before you carry your smoldering life into the steam, and I am looking for signs.

This September Saturday, with fall's cool scales sliding through the mountains, one of the visitors hits a black snake in the road and drops the limp body in her trunk. Tom tells her to drape the body on the river stones piled under the logs. When he lights the fire, the snake burns into the stones. His glittering scales and unblinking eyes, his fragile bones and limber muscles sway up again later in the steam that scalds our faces and drenches our prayer ties. In this egg shaped lodge, covered in scales of sweat and mud, I am dancing the snake. I am about to shed my small, torn skin.