Sneaky Snake
Hello, I’m Babs and I am the guest host of Karbonkountymoos today. This is a little bit like having the keys to the kingdom and sitting in the queen’s chair, I feel unworthy. Karen is so busy on the ranch; but will be back shortly. Don’t runaway; you won’t be stuck with me for long.
In the interim I thought it might be fun to swap snake stories. This would give Karen some entertaining reading and something to look forward to when she ventures in for a break; or, something to dread depending on how she views snakes.
I’ve lived in the country, in rural areas, I have even lived and been all over California; but, I never saw a snake until we bought a small acreage in Oklahoma. As far as I am concerned, I saw a life times worth there and don’t need to encounter another one. Here is one of my stories.
For almost two weeks I had the sneaky suspicion there was a snake in the house. There was no reason for such speculation and it wasn’t a paranoid kind of thought; maybe just a mom’s intuition. This particular day Hubby was working a double shift out of town. My two toddlers were playing down the hall; and I was giving my room a deep cleaning when all of the sudden this little baby copperhead came jamming out of nowhere. He was heading straight for the passageway leading to the hall. My main thought was to keep the snake in the room and away from the boys. Hubby is in law enforcement so I’m looking for some type of club . . . something . . . anything to grab. Nothing was in plain sight, so I stomped on his tail and quickly jumped up on and across the bed. I don’t think I have moved so quickly in all my life. My plan worked without getting bit. He came whipping around to see what had happened to his tail. He saw me, got scared and headed under the dresser. At this point I constructed a split door barricade to keep the snake contained. I put the boys in a room and half barricaded their door to keep them away from the snake (but still in my view). Adorned in rubber boots, rubber gloves and a hoe in hand I go back into the bedroom for combat. One problem, the dresser is too heavy and it won’t budge on the carpet. It did not occur to me to take the drawers out; I must have been in a panic. I knew an officer on the three man police force and decided to call the station. He was not in so I had to tell my story to a stranger (I felt like such a fool). They said they would send animal control. Animal control turned out to be the city gardener, an older fellow in overalls and a shovel. He was misinformed thinking the snake was in the yard. When we entered the house he became a little nervous as he had been outside all day and his vision was blurred with sun spots. He was the hands and I served as the eyes navigating his maneuvers to get a hold of the snake. In the end the gentleman reassured that I had done the right thing; even a baby copperhead can do some damage and can be deadly to a small child.
Here is a link to view snakes of Montana and provide more inspiration.
Now it is your turn. Don’t have a snake story? That’s okay, feel free to share a wild animal story or a sighting of an unusual creature.
April 13th, 2005 at 11:22 am
The work day started like most - greetings and coffee then the memos
for the day began to arrive via email. Things livened up with the
announcement from a co-worker that his boa constrictor had gotten
loose - HIS WHAT??? My dog cannot come to work with me. Nobody’s
cat sits by their desk. But a SNAKE?????????
The message also said to look in warm places as he likes to be warm -
yeah, well, my thermostat is now set at 58 and will go lower every day
till this fugitive is caught.
But I wonder if this was a planned experiment - the halls are empty -
nobody congregates by the coffee cart (it is, after all, WARM) -
office doors are closed and the heat is way down everywhere.
The spectre of this unwelcome beast has people working, energy
being saved and fraternizing is almost non-existent.
Might be there is no snake………..But then, I think I will lower my
thermostat to 55………..
A Missoula Reader
April 13th, 2005 at 12:15 pm
Missoula Reader, that IS creepy! You will have to let us know how this develops. Keep up your feet!
April 13th, 2005 at 12:57 pm
When we moved to Wyoming from the beautiful Bitterroot Valley in 1948, (I was 5) we moved into a house that had been vacant for a long time. These days, it would be called a shack, I am sure. Anyway, when the weather warmed up, the snakes started to appear. My brave mother kept a hoe by the door and everytime she heard a child yell, she was out the door with hoe in hand. She killed over 50 snakes in that yard that summer. Some were rattlers, some were bull snakes. She didn’t really look until they were dead!! None of the kids got hurt but the dog took a bite and survived. bonnie
April 13th, 2005 at 2:21 pm
Bonnie, 50 snakes! Your mother was brave indeed.
Our dog took a bite on the nose by another baby copperhead outside. The kids had walked out the back door and the dog got between them and the snake. We still have our dog hero (Hubby killed the snake).
Thanks Bonnie
April 13th, 2005 at 2:42 pm
The last time that I had to kill a rattlesnake was last summer.
Oh no! No shovel on the pickup - now what do I do? Well, there was an ax. I dispatched the thing with a few chops. I was just glad that no one witnessed the scene.
April 13th, 2005 at 3:44 pm
Karen, did you cook it up for supper? I hear they are good eatin’.
April 13th, 2005 at 4:16 pm
Mom grew up in Eastern Montana…Ranch Creek was my grandparents’ address before Belle Creek happened. She and the younger children walked or rode horses to country schools several miles from the dug out they lived in. They would kill rattlers with rocks. She says that if they killed one in the afternoon, often there would be another in the same place the next morning. She learned to be brave very young and she is still brave at 89! bonnie
April 13th, 2005 at 6:00 pm
What a woman, you old snake charmer. Although I don’t agree with your tail stomping method.
We’ve found probably 200 hundred grown snakes here at our place over the past 25 years, with about a quarter being copperheads. The wife has grown from screaming and getting me to take care of them - kill the poisonous ones and relocate the non-poisonous ones down the hill - to where she now jsut screams and then gets the shovel to take off the heads of anything she’s not sure is non-venomous. We only come across a couple copperheads a year now. (None inside the house yet. But scorpions on the other hand …)
April 13th, 2005 at 6:27 pm
Eat it?! Uh - even I have my limits, Babs!
But I did add the rattle to my collection.
April 13th, 2005 at 6:50 pm
Bonnie, your mother sounds amazing. What great stories come out of interesting living.
Mike, Yeah, I don’t think “Steve the Crocodile Hunter” is going to be envious of my foot stomping technique.
Jeepers, you have had a lot of snakes too. I’m afraid we are not as kind as your wife. I wouldn’t trust my identification capabilities. Oh, we could do a whole story on scorpions alone!
Karen, Yay, a souvenir.
April 13th, 2005 at 7:04 pm
Every year there’s a rattlesnake roundup in Texas, and they say the things taste just like… chicken.
One time my brother killed a rattler near the mouth of a cave (he was a spelunker) and he made the skin into a hat band, rattle attached. Pretty cool.
April 13th, 2005 at 8:32 pm
Chenoah, tastes like chicken - too funny! I think there is a rattlesnake festival in OK; I’ve never been. Brother making it into a hatband is pretty cool.
April 14th, 2005 at 6:58 am
Tradition has it that rattles in your hatband prevents headaches. The boss usually gets a couple every year and he doesn’t complain of headaches. bonnie
April 14th, 2005 at 11:37 am
You know me - I love to comment - but I gotta tell ya - the Monkey is afraid of snakes - don’t like to see ‘em, hear ‘em, or even think about ‘em - so I’ll just move along from this post - even though (as always) - it’s fun and well-written!
Sign me,
A Monkey ‘fraid of snakes.
April 14th, 2005 at 2:55 pm
Bonnie, now that is something I did not know.
Monkey, so sorry - didn’t mean to frighten the Monkey. Thanks for saying hello and giving your support.
April 14th, 2005 at 7:42 pm
Babs - I home Moos is paying you for this. If so, what do you charge. I want a guest host on my blog. Then someone might actually post.
NT
April 15th, 2005 at 9:32 pm
Nt, Oh my goodness, where have you been? It’s good to hear from you.
Karen is not paying me. Can you believe I actually won the opportunity to guest post!?!
April 16th, 2005 at 7:14 am
Having the simple mind that I do, I got confused and posted my snake story back on Bab’s site. Sorry about that.
But here is another, for good measure.
We had a large Eastern Diamond Back rattler in our yard in FL. It was curled up under a ginger plant under my oldes daughter’s window. At first I thought it was a cicada buzzing, but then I realized it was a different sound. A local cat, smart enough to stay out of striking range, had it irritated.
I thought about trying to catch it. Most people who are bitten by poisonous snakes (its over 90 percent, I think–a doc gave me the figures in article once) are guys who are innebriated trying to be macho. I wasn’t drunk, but since I figured I qualified for two of the other three charactertistics, I opted against it.
We left the snake alone–figured it didn’t want to waste its venom on something it couldn’t eat and was doing its very best to tell us so. Eventually it slithered off into the woods and we never saw it again.
April 16th, 2005 at 8:36 pm
Not really a snake story, but…
My mother, God rest her soul, was deathly afraid of reptiles, to the point that she wouldn’t even go into the reptile house when we visited the St. Louis Zoo when I was a kid in the 1960’s (she was from St. Louis, and we were visiting my step-brother’s family, along with my aunt and uncle during the hottest summer in the memory of the oldest resident at the time).
In 1981, she came down to visit me at the condo I was renting in Scottsdale at the time. (Being a mom, she decided to tidy up the place, which meant I had to spend about a month after she left trying to find where she put everything.) One day, I took here to the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix. As we were walking along the paths looking at the various desert plants there, a gecko scampered across the path in front of us.
For those folks who have never seen a gecko (or a commercial for Geico Insurance), this is a small lizard that is about six inches in length–half of that tail. I swear that the woman was THIS close to having a heart attack. (This incident convinced her–especially since I told here that geckos are common in lots of AZ backyards–that there was no way she would ever retire here. So she stayed in Billings until the day she died in 1998.)
Kirk from Kizmai, AZ
May 22nd, 2005 at 11:24 pm
My 2 toddlers and I were relishing the cool air from our brand new (3 days old), $6000 air conditioner. We finally had cool air after a month without it. My son heard baby birds making a fuss outside his window and we went to see what the problem was. Just as he ran past two 6′ snakes on the back porch, I screamed and got him back inside. Feeling somewhat brave from killing one the week before with a shot gun, I went after the gun and baracaded the kids in the house. One of the snakes slithered to the side of the house and into a big holly bush. I had a clear shot- to the snake and straight to the field. 1st shot killed him, but I heard a strange noise and couldn’t imagine what it was. It turned out to be freon escaping through the shot holes in the airconditioner. The bush split the shot and the ricochet hit the brand new a/c. I was devistated and we are without cool air once again.