Snake Tale

Snake Tale

Back in 1983, I was living out in the country about seven or eight miles from Waeldar. I had gotten tired of living a block from the school. There was absolutely no privacy. People asked about any visitors who stopped by. They asked about my packages that came in the mail. I felt like I was under a microscope. I heard from a student at the high school that her daddy, the then president of the school board, had an old farm house available to be rented in Mt. Eden. It sat on the middle of a small 13-acre farm that had been his mother's. I jumped at the opportunity to be farther from the public scrutiny of Waeldar. Even after I saw the place, I was ready to move in.

Now, I have to be honest about the condition of the house. It was in pretty bad shape. I've written about it before and described it as something like a Green Acres kind of place. I pretty much only lived in one room of it. That was a bedroom way in the back that suited me fine. I kept it cool in summer with an old and noisy window AC unit. I kept it warm in the summer with a kerosene heater I bought at the Walmart in Gonzales. To Trooper and me, it was home.

Money was hard to come by the first year I lived there. Waelder ISD had been paying teachers a month before school started for years. TEA put an end to that, and as a result, that year we did not get paid until October first to make up for it. That meant going two months on the July paycheck, which was only about $800. I can't complain too much. There were others with kids in college and mortgages to contend with who were worse off than I. Mom and Marion Hill went through their cabinets and brought a lot of canned stuff to me one day. I took it all to the Home Economics teacher, Patsy Worth. She made sure we all had something to eat for lunch during that horrible time. We all ate in her room like a family.

At the house, I could barely afford anything. I bought a huge sack of the cheapest dog food they had at the grocery store in Gonzales for Trooper. I bought some flour, some cheap cans of cranberry sauce to use as jelly, a small tub of lard, and some powdered milk for me. I made tons of rock hard biscuits during that time.

I had a small fishing tank on my rental property. It was full of little perch. I thought it might have some catfish in it, too, so I asked Mr. Hernandez at NeNe's grocery in Waeldar if he had any chicken livers leftover from the chickens that he barbecued. He gave me a huge box full of the little paper packages you get with a whole chicken. They had a neck, a heart, a liver, and a gizzard in each one. I tried fishing with the liver, but never got a bite. I had put all the rest in the freezer to keep it fresh. I ended up frying it all and eating it with my biscuits. I really like fried chicken necks, gizzards, hearts, and livers.

One day, while I was fishing, Trooper was running around the little creek that runs from the tank and follows the fence line. After a heavy rain, it was more like a little river. Usually, however, the water just sort of sat there. He started barking like a maniac and my heart stopped. The year before, I was fishing at a friend's ranch and Trooper got bit by a copper head. He had been barking the same way just before then. I ran over to get him, but soon saw there was no real danger. Trooper had come across a huge crawdad and was troubling it. It kept trying to back away from him with its claws up in a menacing way, but he wouldn't let it go.

Well, I happen to enjoy eating crawdads. I decided where there was one, there must be more. I had no idea how to catch them. I decided they must be similar to crabs, so I tied a chicken neck to my fishing line and threw it in. Sure enough, a crawdad latched on and stayed on until I could get him over a bucket and wack him loose. The first day I caught about twenty of them. It was a nice little addition to my fried perch and chicken necks.

Now, I had this really cool fishing chair that Marion had given me the previous Christmas. It had a red fishing tackle box attached to it. I used to take it to the little creek and sit right on the edge of it to catch those crawdads. One day, something at my feet got my attention. I watched in sheer terror as the biggest and ugliest water moccasin I had ever seen slithered right between my legs and down into the creek.

I jumped up like a lunatic and ran all the way back to the house. I got my 22 semi automatic, locked Trooper in the kitchen, and ran back to hunt down and kill me a snake! It took a while, but I found him and shot him dead. I did it out of anger. I felt totally violated by it going through my legs like that. I also new that I didn't need him around my personal fishing and crawdadding area, especially with Trooper's history with snakes. And, just to be clear on this- I had no remorse. I murdered that snake in cold blood and would do it again.

Anyway, later that summer, drought conditions stopped the little creek from getting any water, and my crawdad source dried up. So did the fishing tank. I went there one day to fish and it was so low that the water was literally rolling with struggling fish and snakes who had come to feed on them. It was a pitiful site. Somewhere I have a video of it.