Up Close and Personal

Zach spent the morning in the hay field yesterday; and while he made round bales, I started laundry and then went to the barn to ride. I had two horses ridden by noon, and shortly after that he got back. We had a quick lunch and then rode a Nuke and a Banjo. After that ride was over, I came back up to the house to switch the laundry out and while I was here the UPS man came and brought me some cute capris that I’d ordered from Amazon.com the day before (SCORE!). The dogs were barking at him, and everything seemed as per usual for a visitor. Until…

I had just put clothes in the dryer when the UPS man pulled in, and the dogs started barking. I got the dogs quiet, picked up the package and then I heard it. A hissing rattle; though it was super loud it took me, honestly, about 2 minutes to figure out what it was. The dogs were standoffish; Reeses the cat was mingling about, so I thought, “surely it’s not a rattlesnake? Is my new dryer on the fritz?” I stepped into the house and listened. Clearly they were two separate sounds- the dryer and the loud sound coming from under my porch. And then it died out. So I stomped the porch, and it began again. And then, I knew, there was a rattlesnake under my porch.

At first I couldn’t see it. And frankly, I wasn’t interested in seeing it. So I called down to Granny’s house to see if Zach were inside. Lucky for me, he had just walked in so Granny told him that there was a snake under our porch. By the time he arrived, I had located the snake, and could see all 7 of its pretty rattles.

After poking and prodding from the side of the porch where it wasn’t, it finally slithered part way around the step and my silly cat, Reeses, stared him down from about 8 inches away. I just knew he was going to strike her. Zach threw a rock at her feet, and she jumped straight up in the air about a foot. But she didn’t turn away. So he threw another one, and this time she jumped straight up and ran off. The snake went back to where it had been- under the step. We poked and prodded some more with an old rope (the stiff kind you use to rope steers). Success!

The snake slithered out to the corner of where the laundry room intersects the living room. I was ready with the garden hoe in hand. And I did manage to get the, by now, severly pissed off, rattler pinned down. But we couldn’t really maneuver the hoe to get a good shot at chopping its head off, so Zach said we needed to move it. Yeah. Ok. You do that, babe. After several attempts and the angry snake striking the end of the hoe, he did manage to put it in the yard, where he proceeded to chop off its sinister-looking head and promptly bury it. Meanwhile, the nerves of the 3+foot long snake are still shutting off, so once in a while it would rattle. Yes. It. Was. Unsettling.

Needless to say, I could live my whole life without another personal encounter like that; trouble is, I live Little House on the Prairie, daily and the chances of me never having another up close and personal view of your friendly neighborhood rattlesnake are slim to none.