Snake

One year, while hunting quail, I shot a rattlesnake. (They are good eating.) I cut the head off and started carrying it. My buddy had a jacket that had a game bag in the back of it and offered to carry it in his game bag. I thought everybody knew that a snake moves after its death. It was hilarious to watch him trying to get out of that jacket when the snake started moving.

 

Back in high school we were on in school suspension, that’s when you get suspended but instead of going home you do hard labor around the school. It’s the south, they disciplined us.

My buddy was a dumb country boy and when we were mowing the football field, we came across a rattlesnake.

He thought it would be funny to kill it by taking its head off with a shovel.

Then he thought it would be funnier to fuck around with the severed head which promptly bit him in the hand.

Then our Vietnam veteran coach decided to use his belt as a tourniquet, which really didn’t work and had to drive him up to the school office to call 911, because this was before modern cell phones. He crashed his pick up truck on the way up the hill trying to fix the tourniquet.

I guess my idiot friend was lucky and didn’t get seriously envenomated, but they still pumped him full of anti-venom and he had an allergic reaction and spent three weeks in the hospital.

Doctors said he was lucky not to have brain damage.

He works as a financial advisor now.

 

Lots of western diamond back in the Ca. Central valley/Foothills here. Once at a Carnegie hill climb event came across a rattler. Good time for me to show my preteen sons a few related snake saftey things. Cut the head off and buried it. Etc...

Put the tail rattler in a Coke can and in the r.v. sink. Forgot to tell the wife. Ooops....

 

I was driving a Jeep with no top on a brushy trail. I heard what I thought was a tire leak. I walked all around the Jeep stepping very near the snake at least twice before I saw it

 

A bad day

 

Something I didn't want to see as I sit on the throne lol

 

The stuff of fucking nightmares

 

Back in college, one of my classes involved a six week camping trip where students are set loose over a selected terrain, and they are supposed to come back with a detailed geologic map.


So anyways, I'm scrambling up and down some desert cliffs, I find a small bit of shade that looks like an ideal lunch spot. I plop down and lean up against a dead tree, and start gathering my notes while scarfing whatever food I had. This whole time I keep hearing the loudest damn locust I ever heard, and it's sounding like it's coming from my ass.

After a minute or so curiosity gets the better of me and I stand up to see what I sat on. Here's the locust that was less than four inches away from my crack.




What did I do? I pestered it to move out from under the log so that I could take a picture with one of those newfangled digital cameras. Sometimes I think about that though. I was a three mile hike to the nearest road, where I could have radioed the school van. And then it would have been an hour drive to the nearest town.





...


And then there's last year, when I found it's grand nephew basking. I barely caught sight of this one, he was a hair away from being squashed.




Snakes are cool though. I'll bug em enough to grab a picture and then leave them to enjoy their day.

 

• Several years ago while dove hunting had a rattler experience. Shot a dove that came down about 40 yards out. Told my partner I was going to go out and pick up mine and his dove. Walked out through the knee high brown dry grass and spotted the downed dove. I bent over reached my arm out to pick it up when I heard that ominous buzzing sound and saw the coiled rattler about 2 feet from the dove. We locked eyes and I froze in place. I was bent over with my arm extended and didn’t dare move. We stared at each other for at least a couple minutes. It’s seemed much longer. My back and arm were screaming at me in pain from holding that position. My partner had no idea what was going on and I could hear him yelling at me - what the hell ya doing, get back here there’s birds coming. I couldn’t move, couldn’t say a word. I was thinking I’m staring death in the eyes. After what seemed like an hour the snake uncoiled and slithered off. I grabbed the bird, went back to my friend and explained what happened. I was done hunting for the day.
  
• 
  Walked back to my truck about a quarter mile away checking every inch of the way for snakes. Got to my truck, unloaded and put away my shotgun and sat on the tailgate and drank the coldest and best tasting beer I ever had. Then I drove to our hunting camp and continued drinking beer until I was shitfaced. Never been real keen on dove hunting since that day.

 

Just to be a jerk and play one-ups ... well, maybe ...

Someone told of her snake experience. She stopped in the middle of a 1.5 mile trail, mid-June. The trail is about 2 ft wide much of the way, rising hill one side and dropping down 50 ft on the other. She rested because it is a steep trail in mid-June in PHX AZ. When she start to go, she saw that a snake had half-curled around her foot ... guess she made a nice shade-tree. She braved-up, readied her leg, then kicked/slid the thing down the 50-ft slope/drop.

She spoke of it rather casually, like someone who has been "through the fire".

I have been rattled at by a coiled mojave green rattler. Another time I was walking on a trail and noticed movement at the left edge of the trail near my left foot. It was another mojave green. Damn thing slithered about 20 ft up the trail and parked in the middle of it. It was not moving, so I circled on an angled hill to the right, using my hands to stabilize. It was covered in tiny spikey-plants. I had to buy Nair at Walgreens 2 miles from the trailhead to get all of the damn spikes out!

 

Too GD close for me!

 

That's why you pre-flush.

 

Thats gonna end with a plumber trying to fix the results of a D-60 getting dumped cyclic.

 

Found out these out of a full turkey choke don't leave much behind after hitting a coiled rattler.

 

"He works as a financial advisor now."

I was drinking coffee and LOL'd so much it came out my nose.

 

I used a .22 handgun.

 

They put a snake in the toilet in the movie Porky's, lol.

 

Timber rattler I encountered in the Catskills, NY a few years back:

 

Fuck the nope ropes.