There were, Julio thought, two clear advantages to working in the fields rather than in the groves. For one thing, you did not have to climb a ladder to pick tomatoes, and thus there was much less risk of breaking your bones. Besides that, a full basket of tomatoes weighed less than half as much as a boxload of oranges, a difference for which your back was grateful at the end of a day in the fields. Also, he suddenly remembered, there was the matter of snakes. In the fields he had seen only one, a watery green whip said to be harmless unless you were a bug or a mouse; but the groves had been crawling with mean little rattle-tailed vipers.