Perhaps I have blogged about this in the past, I am scared of snakes. That is a little unfortunate, since we have so many in Kansas. The most numerous are bull snakes, black snakes, copperheads, and rattle snakes. The rattler and copperhead are poisonous, the bull snakes and black snakes are not, but bull snakes wake up mad and do their best to convince you they are deadly, and they are big, sometimes 6 feet long.
It was just two weeks ago on a sunny Sunday afternoon I was putting mineral out for the cows. I use old lick tubs for mineral feeders, and every once in a while the cows flip them over. I was happy, whistling a tune and paying little attention to the world around me. I pulled the pickup next to an overturned tub, hopped out and kicked it over and all hell broke loose, there were two huge bull snakes underneath it. Bull snakes make sort of a roar when they are mad, and shake their tails I suppose in an effort to make you believe they are rattlers.
If the two bull snakes wanted to scare me, they had succeeded. I ran as fast as I could away from the roaring striking snakes, shaking like a baby. However, they perhaps overplayed their hand. Rather than slinking away and letting me put out my mineral, they kept striking and roaring as I climbed into the passenger side of the pickup...where I had a rifle. My father and grandfather lectured me for years on how beneficial bull snakes and black snakes are, how many rodents they eat, etc, and all of that is true. What is also true is I hate snakes, and while I have learned to tolerate them for the most part, I have my limits and these two snakes had reached them. I ended their roaring rather abruptly.
I was going to write a blog just about that experience, and never got around to it, when last weekend I had another snake experience. My brothers two daughters, 4 and nearly 2 years old, had been deposited with their grandparents for a few days. I was going down the road dragging a load of silage for the cows past my parents house when I spied a snake that looked like a rattler crossing the road, with my mother pushing what you call a pram with one niece in it and the other walking along beside, all had on these sorry little plastic shoes called "crocs" here, that have no protection against snake bite what so ever.
With what I consider remarkable skill I whipped the tractor and feedwagon full circle in the road, and staring down on the snake from above as it struck at my front tire ascertained it was indeed a rattlesnake, not good to have in my parents lawn with two little girls about. I was trying to run over it, it was not about to be run over, and I managed to whip the tractor and wagon around two more times.
One might think this display would set off some alarm in my mothers head, she kept plodding toward the snake, apparently as my brother later said believing I was either on some type of drugs or having a seizure of some sort. Realizing I was not going to get the snake with the tractor, I jumped from the cab shouting at my mother to get a gun from the house(Grandma could lop a snakes head off with a hoe, I am not nearly as brave as Granny was, especially with an honest to goodness venomous snake). I wanted to keep an eye on the snake, and I knew from the rabid skunk incident of several years ago mother would NOT do a good job of watching where the snake went.
The rabid skunk incident, since you ask, was perhaps true and perhaps not. Mother phoned one morning in a panic that there was a rabid skunk chasing the dog. Skunks are notorious for carrying rabies, and the fact it was chasing the dog was a sign it was probably rabid. I rushed to the scene to find nothing...asking mother where the skunk had gone she replied she didn't know...she was cleaning house...she thought it went north east. I never saw the skunk. With that in mind I was roaring at my mother, who still apparently did not see the coiled rattling snake in front of the tractor to get a gun, and she was telling me to go inside and get it myself. Still not wanting to take my eyes off the snake, I ran into their garage in search of a hoe, perhaps I could muster as much courage as my elderly grandmother once had and lop off the head, all I could find was a sort of a rake, not the best thing for killing a snake. Meanwhile, the current grandma of our family was blundering toward a very irate rattle snake with two little girls in tow, mumbling about how disrespectful I was to her and what a bad example I was setting for her two granddaughters when I roared GET INSIDE!!. Mother turned to argue, as she is always apt to do, when I unleashed a string of expletives followed with CAN"T YOU SEE THE DAMNED RATTLESNAKE?!?!?!
There is possibly just one person in the world more scared of snakes than I am,and that is my mother. With amazing speed and grace she raced with the "pram"(we call them strollers) up the walk with my other niece scampering beside her. She snatched the baby up and into the house she went. This entire scenario has taken much longer to type than it took in real life, from start to finish we had probably been in this "situation" for about 2 minutes.
I was hot on the heels of my mother, and went to the closet where my father keeps his guns. Dad never had much in the way of firearms when I was growing up, a 30.30 rifle I have never shot, a .22 pistol that I can't hit anything with, and a 20 gauge shotgun. Over the last 5 or so years my brother has bought him several fancy guns, I have never shot. Not wanting to try something new, I was at my whits end trying to find the old shotgun, finally finding the little .410 I used as a young boy, but no shells. My nieces watched wide eyed as their crazy uncle dumped boxes of shells all over the floor and flung stuff out of the closet in an effort to find something to kill the snake with, short of using the fancy new Browning shotgun as a club. Finally, I found the old shotgun and two shells, ran outside and shot the snake. We are up to 4 minutes of crisis now.
I cleaned up all the ammunition on the floor, put away the guns, showed my older niece the snake and the rattles, shook them for her to hear, and warned her not to touch a snake that looked like that, and not to stand there and scream, but to run away.
When my sister-in-law returned to fetch her daughters a few days later, we were all eating lunch and the subject was brought up. I was a little sheepish at the fit I had thrown, and looked at Olivia and said "your uncle got a little upset didn't he?". She put down her spoon and said to her mother, "he yelled dammit get me a gun right now!! to grandma". Guess she is at the right age to pick that language up.