Snake Hunting

Give or take a year it was about the fall of 1972, or maybe ‘73.  Several of us had gotten together for a morning of rabbit chasin’.  I remember my brother Bob was along, also my brother-in-law Wendy, and two or three others.  Oh yes, my brother Fred was there too.

There are two sizes of beagles.  The larger are known as 15”, while the smaller are 13”, denoting their height.  I kept several of the latter.  After all the guys were gathered at my place, I turned the dogs loose from the pen.  This always got them excited as they realized a hunt was in store whenever that happened.  The next few minutes were taken up watching the fool dogs as they sniffed everything in sight, including each other, even though they had all been in the same pen.

After the newness wore off I started my ancient 1946 Jeep, we all climbed in it, or on it, and off to the woods we headed with hounds strung out behind.  After several minutes of traveling we reached our destination.  We broke out some coffee from thermos jugs as we stood around in the chilly early morning air awaiting our hounds to open up announcing they were hot on the trail of a moving-on bunny.

I don’t really recall how we did with our hunting on that given day, but I don’t think we were ever skunked, so we must have got at least one or two.  Finally it was time to say, “Enough for one day,” and gathering the dogs in we began to walk toward the Jeep.  By this time the sun had risen high enough in the morning sky to warm the day somewhat from its earlier crispness.  As we walked Fred spotted a snake crawling under a rock.

For lack of anything better to do, he latched onto the rock half frozen into the ground.  It was possibly a foot in diameter or so.  Fred was quite a powerful man and with seeming ease he rolled the rock up out of its hole in the ground to reveal a writhing mass of garter snakes all wrapped up in a moving ball.  There had to be at least 25 or 30 of them all in a hole under that rock.  They were apparently nested there for the winter season.  After the rock was moved, and the sun warmed them a bit, they began to crawl loose from the bundle.  They crawled off in various directions to whatever their fate may have been after having their nest disturbed.

I had seen this same sort of thing once before.  When I was a teenager, I was plowing a meadow one fall, and plowed a ball of snakes to the surface.  They too had been under a rock.  In slow motion they had all crawled back under a freshly plowed furrow, apparently to survive the winter there.