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By DAPHNE HUTCHINSON
Arundel Newipapen Staff Writer
“Old man George kept rattlesnakes in a bathtub,” remembers Charlie Estes who ran the Cab Inn in Sperryville where George Freeman Pollock used to stop for dinner on his way from Washington to Skyland.
“Those snakes would strike at you but not at him!”
The Little Chief of Stony Man was famous for his snake charming. Photographs show him dressed in a pith helmut and riding boots, twirling a rattlesnake while a violinist in gypsy garb played Song of India and in coat and tie, holding his pet rattler, as he posed with a former governor, a former secretary of the Interior and other dignitaries.
He carried snakes in his mouth for Hopi Indian dances and lugged four rattlers at a time down the mountain and onto the train to Washington, D.C., in a com meal sack. For several summers, Mr. Pollack kept as many as five loose rattlers in the bathroom of his Skyland cottage, pushing them aside when they got in his way.
What was his secret? It wasn’t pulling the fangs of the venomous reptiles.
“I have never handled a snake whose fangs were removed,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Fangs in snakes are like the finger nails of a human being, and if you remove one, another immediately begins to grow and in a short time replaces the one which was lost.”
If he had a secret, it was the same understanding of the animal
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