SNAKES ALIVE!

It's almost hunting season here and I am pretty depressed about not being able to go this year. I just had knee surgery. I started thinking about all my memorable hunting trips and wrote this.

I found a rattler in the back yard a couple years ago. I chopped off its head put it in a box, put the box in another box and put the boxes in a trash bag so the trashmen don't grab it. I do not like snakes. I do not even like pictures of snakes. Everyone tells me they are Gods creatures and tell me about ecology and their right to be here and inform me of the odds of being bit by one. I don't care. I don't like snakes. Here in the high desert mountains of Colorado I have seen more rattlesnakes than any other kind of snake. I've never been bitten and don't plan on it. For me the only good snake is a dead snake. Yes, I know how that sounds.

My friend Buzz and I hunt in places that have lots of snakes. We go where the elk are. Or at least Buzz thinks they're there. 

Archery season is early here and the temp is usually pushing ninety by the afternoon, so I'm always worried about snakes. The snakes are denned up by the time winter gun season rolls around so other hunters laugh at my fear of snakes. I always warn them about snow snakes, and tell them about my grandaddy killing one during a blizzard in about 1930.

I advise them to take a hair rope with them next winter because snow snakes are timid and no one knows if they are poisonous. They laugh nervously and return to their beer. They may not believe me but I can make them think I believe me. I've seen more than one snake bite kit in a persons vehicle after having heard my yarns.

Buzz is a crummy hunter. He never ever shuts up. That's why I hunt with him. I on the other hand am an amazing hunter. I know just how to stay away from elk. I hunt with Buzz. I'm old now and mostly go just to see the animals. I have all the racks I want and I hate killing things. I love the meat and I love finding them, but I really hate cleaning them and dragging them out, even so it's my job to do something macho so I can drink beer, lie and play poker with the guys. That's why I hunt with self-bows. (a hand made bow made of one piece of wood or one held together by sinew, very primitive, and very little power or accuracy compared to today's bows.) It's cool because people think you are too good of a hunter to use modern equipment. 
I carry some aspirin in a nitro glycerine heart medicine bottle in case Buzz accidentally falls off a cliff arrow first and kills an elk that happens to be wandering by. 

I would just pull the bottle out, kind of grab my chest and say, "I better take a couple of these nitro pills before we start carrying it out." That way he would feel guilty and not let me carry anything. Needless to say I haven't had to use it yet.
Buzz cracks me up. He takes hunting very seriously. He spends entire weekends tuning his arrows and new fangled glass laminated longbow. He practices for hours, and spends more than my annual income on archery gizmos and camo. He washes all his clothes in no-scent soap. He cleans my truck with it every hunting season. He sprays all kinds of scent killer stuff on his boots and clothes before we go in the forest, lights up a cigarette and says "Lets go get'um grampa." I just nod my head and smile.
On a slow day (they're  all slow days with Buzz) Buzz will regularly look at my feet and yell "Snake!" where upon I invariably do my snake dance which consists of jumping ten feet straight up in the air and somehow teleporting about ten yards away. 
 I think it's the only reason he hunts with me. 

Buzz is a physicist. He calibrates radiation for medical equipment. I have no idea how that makes him a physicist. He doesn't have fuzzy hair or smoke a pipe. He says watching me helps him understand the laws of physics better. He also claims to have improved my reflexes by about two hundred percent. Some where in physicist heaven Albert Einstein is smacking himself on the forehead.

One day he'd made me jump a lot and I was getting pretty cranky about it. I'm older than Buzz and a lot of times when Buzz took after a trail I'd tell him I would go around the other side of the mountain or whatever and then instead I'd go back to camp and eat something or take a nap so that's what I did that day. Sitting in a lawn chair at camp I had gotten a pine martin (I don't really know what the hell it was.) to almost start eating out of my hand by throwing crumbs of donuts at him and we had become pretty good friends. I named him boogie because he could climb faster than any animal I've ever seen. A pine martin is about three feet long and very thin. It's kind of like a ferret but bigger. They are usually only found in Wisconsin, but I've seen seen some critters  that look just like them here in Colorado so I assume thats what Boogie was. It was a very special treat.

Buzz came back to camp with, Surprise! nothing but blisters. He took off his boots and grabbed a donut. I started to talk about snakes and I asked him if he had ever seen a furred snake. He started laughing, but I stuck to my guns and told him about my grandaddy killing one in 1931 the year after he killed the white snow snake and how they were very rare and almost extinct nowadays. I think he almost believed in snow snakes too.
 About that time Buzz set his donut down on the stump next to him and sure enough, Boogie darted out to snatch a piece of donut off the stump.
It took me a while to get Buzz out of the truck. (Why would you lock the doors to get away from a snake?) I'm sure he knows about the speed of light and laws of gravity better than Einstein now. He didn't bother me with snake sightings after that. It was a great year, we didn't get anything.