I’m completing my pre-run stretches on the dirt road that runs into the top of my circular dirt driveway. The driveway leads up the hill from my cabin on Lake Martin in Alabama. This connecting dirt road winds around for a mile and a half and before intersecting with State highway 63. I take this run up and back to the highway every other evening. RATTLE, RATTLE…! I’m hearing this sound - loud enough to be a heavy toy baby rattle – the whole time from when I exit the house to when I’m walking up the driveway to the dirt road. RATTLE, RATTLE, the nonstop sound continues.

Okay, curiosity has persuaded me to take a look-see. To me it doesn’t have the higher pitch of a rattlesnake’s warning rattle, which I’ve encountered several times during my woodland outings. No, this sound is much heavier and louder. As I go back down the sloping driveway towards my house, I notice the sound is coming from a collection of fallen trees and limbs in a hollow to my left. As I start down the slope to the ravine, I see my cat, Patches, up on a fallen tree peering intently down towards a pile of logs and branches. I call out to him, but he doesn’t move a muscle. I stop and try to see what he’s locked into visually. He’s facing towards the wood pile where the baby rattle sound is coming from. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out the situation. It’s got to be a rattlesnake... and a big one at that.

I follow the sound, as I approach the wood pile. I look back up at my cat and trace his stare down to the other side of an up rooted tree trunk. Quietly, and cautiously, I move up to the trunk and peer over it. There in a flat circular coil is a magnificent, dark-colored Timber Rattler. The only thing moving are it’s rattles, that are violently quivering and sounding like my daughter’s baby rattle. Everything else about this bad boy is dead still.

I stay focused on the snake, because I don’t want to lose him. Normally, I don’t bother these snakes, but this one is a little to close to my house...and he’s a keeper. I slowly back away from the tree stump and then haul butt up to the house and grab my rifle; a Winchester semiautomatic .22 that I had previously loaded with shorts. I had been doing some nighttime frog hunting with these light loads along the shoreline of our slough. I wouldn’t have wanted to use a long rifle cartridge at this range, so the shorts were perfect; not to do much body damage. Oh yeah, this beauty is going to be mounted. As I’m turning, rifle in hand, and running back down into the draw, I call out to my, then, wife, Elizabeth, that there was a monster rattle snake in the gully.

My cat hasn’t moved from his observation post. I slow down and, quietly, approach the fallen tree. I ease up to it and, slowly, look over to see that the snake has not moved, save the constant rattling from it’s 11 rattles. I, quietly, lift the rifle over the log and aim it down at it’s head. I’m, quickly, going over in my mind where the brain is located on a snake. I’m thinking, you draw a line between it’s eyes and then imagine an equilateral triangle pointing towards it’s body, and the brain should be at the apex of the trigon. Or is that for a crocodile? Anyway, bang! I drill him, as I have calculated.

Nothing! Not a single twitch of the body. I mean “dead still.” “I couldn’t have missed,” I’m thinking. The only clue was no more rattling. I still wasn’t sure, so I popped him, again. Still no movement, whatsoever. I waited about five minutes, or so and, then, took the rifle muzzle and carefully poked it’s head with it. Still, nothing. Dead still, literally. I, finally, conclude that this fella is toast. I, gingerly, reach down and, quickly, grab him behind the head and then lift him over the log. What a beauty. I had to hold him up high, he was so long.

I took him back to the house and laid him out on the side walk. I wanted to get some pictures with Patches, and me, and the snake, so I asked Elizabeth to snap a couple of shots. Wrong! The cat went unhinged, when I tried to get him in the picture close to the snake. He shredded my arm and leg and let out a horrific feline hiss and growl and tore off into the night. We took a couple of pictures without him and, then, I configured the snake into a coil and, carefully, wrapped him up in double plastic grocery bags and then, much to Elizabeth’s horror, put him in the freezer. He stayed frozen from freezer to freezer for 16 years, as we moved to different addresses, and until I gave him to, Troy Kinunen, at my address in Mt. Juliet, TN. He, then, along with his friend JR, took it out of my freezer and transported the beast in an ice chest back to Wisconsin, where he had the stunner mounted, and where it remains to this day.