Quilt Notes: For illustrations of SNAKE'S TRAIL and numerous other "drunkard's path" type quilt designs, with full templates and cutting & piecing instructions, see: 65 DRUNKARD'S PATH QUILT DESIGNS, by Pepper Cory, Dover, 1991.

The white line accurately tracks how a snake's trail looks on the ground. But the endless labyrinth (compare with BOSTON STREETS) or maze of SNAKE'S TRAIL , created by these lines, acts more like a garden hedge, so that the person walking the path follows the empty spaces in between the lines. Scroll down and play with the page background a little bit, and you will notice that if you get on the wrong track you meet a barrier quickly. Simply step outside the barrier, and once on the right path the journey is effortless and has no end (that's what makes it a labyrinth as well as a maze). This is one of the (secret) versions, which will repeat the maze across the quilt, continuously. According to Pepper Cory: "The blocks, with their double circles in the opposing corners, could be arranged in many maze sets...the directions for setting the blocks in the maze were carefully hoarded and passed from quiltmaker to quiltmaker." So if you're not a quiltmaker, or lover of quilt designs, forget all of this.

THE SNAKE
^{(Garter snake from Washington Fish & Wildlife)}
(glorious poem from Emily Dickinson's Nature Mysticism)

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him — did you not?
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun —
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.

Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.