But while I wobbled away from the scene of the crime on that VooDoo like I do so ... well ...the Great Karmic Wheel was rolling, too. And if I'd been listening, instead of mentally carving a notch in my pistol, I might have heard Something laughing Its ass off.

Having spent the better part of quite some time smoothing the ruffled feathers of public land managers, I've long coveted my very own private cyclo-cross course. I finally got the makings when my wife, Shannon, and I moved from Colorado Springs to 40-odd acres in the Wet Mountains, outside Westcliffe. The terrain isn't ideal -- more mountain-bikey than 'cross -- but like a sculptor sees a statue in the raw stone, I saw a course in the undulating, rock-pocked meadow.

I started chipping away at it in desultory fashion in 1996, following deer trail; not branching out much, just taking what I was offered. It had been a dry year, so I didn't have to do too much swashbuckling with the old hand scythe. The upshot was a little less than a mile of rolling circuit, a six-minute lap, with a couple of good run-ups, two creek crossings and a few gradual, rideable hills. It wasn't perfect, but I wasn't Adri van der Poel.

This fall, with that incontinent bastard El Nino pissing on my Northwaves, I had a tougher row to hoe. Very wet, high grass, thick weeds, rabbitbrush out the ying-yang. I couldn't even find last year's course, much less duplicate it.

So what the hell, let's break some new ground. Kinder to Mother Earth, anyway. Out with the hand scythe, plus a push-mower, an IMBA-issue Rock Shox trail tool, a shovel and a pickax.

Three, four days in August. Hotter than the hubs of hell. And I'm no ditch-digger. The hardest work I do on most days is falsifying an expense report. Erasing the pencil sketch after inking the 'toon. Tellng a marketing geek, sure, everyone and their grandmomma gone buy your bike if you just sponsor my cyclo-cross series, please please please.

But it's worth it, blisters, sunburn and all, because this is my course. No poodle walkers, no inline skaters, no equestrians, no bird-watchers, and no jittery land managers.

But we all share the trails with someone. My trail buddies turned out to be rattlesnakes.

Buzzworms, in the popular local parlance. You don't get that visceral appreciation for phrases like "viper in my bosom" or "snake in the grass" until you've heard one buzz right next to your shaven leg, then seen it leap -- like a fake snake in a spring-loaded gag can -- and vanish in the high weeds. Or wind into a tight coil and hiss like a teakettle full of teeth.

Now, I'm no pilgrim. I may be a city boy, and a relative newcomer to the country, but I reconnoitered a bit before we bought our corner of Eden, and one downside people kept bringing up was the surfeit of serpents in Custer County. Bullshit, I blustered, waving an outdated copy of the Sierra Club Naturalist's Guide. They don't live above 8200 feet. Where do I sign?

Well, hell. Snakes can't read. After seeing two rattlers on our road above the 8500-foot mark, I started adding a semiautomatic .22 pistol to my course-construction tool kit. And a good thing, too, because while I was whacking away at the last 10 meters of weeds, I heard that sound under a clump of rabbitbrush next to my right boot.

"HOLY SHIT!" I remarked, vanishing and instantly reappearing some dozen feet away in a clear violation of the laws of time and space. Down with the hand scythe, out with the hand cannon, and after a few ear-splitting seconds of single-track surgery by Drs. Smith and Wesson, the patient expired. A hasty arms-length autopsy with the scythe revealed the cause of death to be several through-and-through GSWs exacerbated by an assault with a hand scythe.

Some courses are harder to clear than others. Still, before long, the circle was complete. The time had come, at last, to hop on a bike and take a test ride (setting the pistol, for safety's sake, atop a barrier). Halfway through the first lap, the need for some fine-tuning became evident, especially where spectator control was concerned. The next of kin of the dear departed had a few wordsss to sssay about the recent upswing in ride-by shootings, the difficulty of dialing 911 when one lacks fingers, and the disgraceful way in which middle-class white males evade prosecution for assaults upon working-class reptiles.

I went back for my .22-caliber snake repellent, but when I returned, my critic was gone, looking for the quickest exit, an ACLU attorney or some of the brothers -- your guess is as good as mine.

My guess was, if he didn't have brothers, he had cousins. Or at least casual acquaintances who were friendlier to him than I intended to be. So come Saturday, when I'd planned a hard 90 minutes of 'cross on "my" course, I was oddly reluctant to set out.

Maybe a little endurance work instead, I thought. Something with fewer teeth in it. Say ... a two-hour road ride. But dirt roads, on the 'cross bike. Nice, wide dirt roads, with no thick, grassy borders hiding God knows what.

And all went smoothly. The roads were free of traffic, wheeled and otherwise; the only Diamondbacks were hanging from the ceiling in my shed. Until I got about a mile and a half from home, semi-cratered and suffering a touch of the bonk.

HHHHIiiiissssssssssssss!

Damn. A flat. Shit. Off the bike and into the saddlebag; out with the old tube, in with the new tube. Let's go, Christ, it's looking like rain and that means lightning and I dunno what kind of conductor titanium is but I'm sure it's better than my living-room couch. Pump it up, slam it in the dropouts and let's go.

But what's this? Aw, man, the front's flat, too! And look at these oddly familiar puncture patterns. No thorns, no nails, no sidewall blowouts ... just two parallel slits in each tube.