The way Joe Hayes tells the story, you might really believe a rattlesnake could chew gum.

It’s a fantastic tale, to be sure, involving Hayes’ childhood love of bubble gum and an encounter with a rattler. It’s the sort of story kids of all ages love — a potentially deadly encounter that turns comical in an incident that involves trouble with mom and a teacher, and, of course, bubble gum.

Hayes, 75, has been telling these kinds of stories, most with Southwestern flavor, for about 40 years. His world of fables involves trickster coyotes, rolling and screaming skulls, and places where it snows tortillas.

Somehow his storytelling style makes the tall tales believable.

Hayes gets that. He likes to tell people, “Stories are not like a history book, but they are true if you can learn something about life, about people, about the way things happen.”

Hayes will bring his storytelling talents to the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian for two more weekends this summer before bidding that long-standing gig goodbye for good.

“It just sort of ended,” he said in a recent interview.

Storytelling is as old as the first human beings. People told stories to share history, to survive, to entertain and, perhaps most importantly, to connect. Many of people can recall an older relative who enjoyed regaling others with stories, real or imagined, at the dinner table.

Perhaps, with the advent of computer technology and social media, that is

slowly changing, Hayes said. In some ways, he added, technology has actually helped promote the personal story.

“We have sort of arrived at a place of universal celebrity,” he said. “Everybody thinks the whole world wants to know what they are doing every minute of every day.

“I like personal stories, but I like them in conversational context rather than a performance context.”

He hopes to continue doing the occasional storytelling in the classroom, he said, because he loves telling stories to kids, who have a particular penchant for investing in the process as listeners.

They also keep him in line when he chooses to add or eliminate a detail from the version of the story he told last time.

“They catch you,” Hayes said with a laugh.

Hayes recalled, as a child, being enthralled with his father’s recounting of stories and folk tales, particularly the ones told on St. Patrick’s Day about leprechauns. His dad was an Irish immigrant, an Episcopalian priest, a bit of a con man on occasion and a good storyteller, Hayes said.

Hayes’ father read his kids poetry and dramatic works by Walt Whitman; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

“In many ways, he was something of an inspiration for what I ended up doing,” Hayes said.

Hayes didn’t set out to be a storyteller. He studied to be a teacher and a geologist. Born in Pennsylvania but mostly raised in the small town of Benson, Ariz., he moved to Santa Fe in 1976 to take a job teaching English at Los Alamos High School.

He started collecting and creating stories around that time, using his interest in literature, geology and cultural studies to learn quite a few and writing his own — such as The Gum-Chewing Rattler, one of many stories Hayes has had published over the years.

One day, as he was washing clothes in the old Palace Laundromat, he told a story to a young girl about a boy who goes to get some soap. She ran off and told her mother, Ruth Holmes, a community relations director for one of the local banks who had ties to the Wheelwright Museum.

The next thing Hayes knew, he was telling stories at the museum.

His first gig there was in 1982.

He said museum officials were expecting maybe 50 people showing up. Well over 100 did, he said, and he usually draws 100 to 150 people at each Wheelwright event.

Parents who were once children at his storytelling sessions return with their children in tow and get caught up in the joy of watching how Hayes’ stories affect their little ones.

“That’s a big part of satisfaction from adults, seeing how kids respond to the story,” Hayes said.

Robin Abeles, who grew up in Santa Fe, was one of those kids some 30 or 35 years ago. Now 42 years old, the physician assistant who lives on the East Coast can still recall the details of many of Hayes’ stories. As a child, he said, he saw the characters in those stories — the upside down dog, the mischievous horned toad and even La Llorona — in the people he knew in his neighborhood on Hillside Avenue, just east of the downtown area.

“When I looked around outside, I saw all of his characters on Hillside,” Abeles said. “Joe’s stories were so relatable. They way he told them was, ‘It was about you, it was your story growing up.’ And he told stories in Spanish and English. He’s the reason I’m bilingual. I grew up wanting to understand both languages.”

Hayes’ daughter, Kathleen Hayes, who works as a graphic designer in Maryland, said her dad always had a story on hand, “whether it was just me and my brother [Adam], or we had cousins around and the kids needed to be calmed down or entertained.”

“I remember him sort of developing the kinds of stories he liked to tell,” she said. “He started more with Irish stories he had learned from his father, and then he would tell a lot of tall tale sorts of stories. He got interested in different folk tales from different cultures. Then he started to zero in on Native American and Hispanic tales, which is a culture he grew up around as well.”

For Joe Hayes, it’s rewarding to know that people remember him — and his stories.

“That’s really gratifying,” he said. “When I think about that, I say to myself, ‘What a lucky guy I’ve been, to make a connection like that, to have people express appreciation for what you do.’ Golly, what a big reward that is.”