Hear me?

 

There’s something about a snake that turns people into liars, Baptist deacons and monastery monks alike. Drop a two-foot long grass snake into anybody’s lap, and inside of an hour it’s a twenty-foot python.

Well, there was that very first snake story, right? Eve had to lie about it and, well, here we are. That being said, you know who to blame for whatever follows in the next five minutes, maybe ten if you decide to reread this piece.

I was put to thinking about the subject, snakes and liars, by an accidental view of a stick-on calendar on the dash of my pickup, probably the best place to find me during turkey season. Early on in my turkey hunting career, I became aware that, give or take a day or two, you could count on seeing the year’s first snake about April 15th, ditto for the year’s first migrating warblers, but they don’t bite.

Were the publishers of this paper to allow it, I could run off about five full pages of turkey season snake stories; some of them more hair raising than others, and this from a guy that genuinely likes snake. It’s the poisonous ones that raise the hair.

Rattlesnakes? I guess, but a full contingency of copperheads and cottonmouths as well. No coral snakes. Yet.

There’s a good reason for that mid-April kickoff. Snakes hibernate in this country until the outside air temperature reaches a steady fifty-five degrees. That usually comes all over Oklahoma about the exact middle of April. When that happens, snakes come out of their winter dens both hungry and keyed-in to heterosexual companionship, and they travel widely to secure both. Chances of a turkey hunter bumping into one? Excellent. It shouldn’t surprise, but it always does.

I have a friend that hikes the Wichita Mountains Preserve frequently. He does not hunt, and is not as attuned to reptile behavior as me. He e-mails from time to time to ask about snake activity. He does not want it to interfere with his rambling about those stony outcrops near Lawton. “Butch,” I will say, “Just check the weather before you leave the house. If the guy says above fifty-five for the day, watch out.”

Those days do happen in the winter in this country, by the way. Some of you remember the young G.I. on maneuvers in those same Wichita mountains near Ft. Sill this past January or February that was bitten by a rattler that caused him to lose a limb (I can’t remember which) and almost his life. Sneaky snakes can do more than drink up all of your root beer.

The late Dwain Bland of turkey hunting fame told me onetime of resting his back, while standing, against a big pine down in the wild Kiamichi mountains near Heavener. He had neither heard nor seen a turkey all morning, and was somewhat bored when he glanced down at his feet and spotted a beautifully marked pygmy rattler about twelve inches long, what the natives in that country call a “ground rattler”. Dwain, like me, had a lifelong fascination with snakes of all kinds.

In that interest, he searched around on the ground and found a small stick with a suitable fork once pruned with his pocketknife, and pinned the tiny snake right behind the head leaving just enough neck behind its head that it was able to turn around and bite Dwain right on the thumb when he picked it up for closer examination. It was such a tiny rattler, he continued hunting. By midnight, unbearable pain had him in the hospital in Poteau. Doctors there saved his thumb, and everything attached to it.

No, he did not stop picking up snakes. Like I said, it was a lifelong fascination. Evel Knievel stopped jumping motorcycles before Dwain Bland stopped picking up snakes. I mean that. Dwain passed away about two weeks after his last turkey hunt, by himself, at the age of eighty-five, and not a snake around for miles, it being a fall hunt.

One warm spring day thirty, maybe thirty-five, years ago, I was hunting gobblers out in the middle of that wild mesquite barrens country coursed by Grape Creek up along the Texas line west of Mangum. Wonderful turkey country to have so many rattlesnakes in it; many, many, many.

I have for a long time been nearly legally deaf, in fact I may be, a fact precluded by an overwhelming genetic cheapness that refuses to accede to the purchase of the two hearing aids necessary, at $2500 a pop, to make me whole again. An electronic product first served up under the name “Action Ears” saved the last thirty-five years of my turkey hunting career. With the Action Ears, which on my head show up like giant Mickey Mouse ears (I don’t care, M-O-U-S-E), I can hear turkeys gobble as far away as you can. Without them, I can’t hear them gobble sitting in my lap.

The first year I used them, hunting alone as usual, I was in the midst of crossing a wide pasture carpeted with beautiful spring grass no higher than pool table felt. My eyes were on the horizon, knowing full well before I did it, that this was absolutely one of the worst ways to hunt turkeys in that wide open country, but I did it anyway so eager was I to get from point “A” to “B”.

My eyes were on that promising distant horizon when I heard that chilling “buzz” that needed no explanation, filling my new electronics as well as the inside of my head with Surround Sound, thank you, Dr. Bose. My right foot was literally in the air, hovering midstep, and about to come down in the middle of thirty-three feet of coiled western diamond back rattlesnake. No snake lie. Well, O.K., let’s say the snake was only a four-footer, does that make you feel any better about it? Not me. Now that memory, and the number “four”, serves me better, I know that snake to have been a good forty feet long.

Without the Action Ears, I would have been bitten a mile away from the pickup; another twenty miles from a hospital. They quit making Action Ears about five years after that incident; new products do not serve me as well, I have tried most of them. My old Action Ears, carefully stored and protected after each season, still do. If you have an old pair you don’t want, let me know.

I don’t hunt turkeys as much as I used to, having lost much of my anger for them, and my physical abilities no longer matching the best of the game which was always the endless walking and searching, for me. Hunting. I loved it. Who cares the snakes are out? They are part of the adventure.

I’m not lying.