This week my son came in the house and showed me a picture of him holding a snake up that was longer than he was tall. His dog had it bayed in the back yard, just about twenty feet from our back door. Jakob couldn’t help but mess with it once he figured out it was non poisonous.
Ever since I was a small kid I’ve had bad experiences with the serpent. It doesn’t help that the first thing God cursed in the Bible was a snake. I guess even Sunday school taught me snakes are bad.
One of the first run ins with a snake was when I was mowing the yard with my dad. He ran over a water moccasin and it tried crawling up on the riding mower with me and him. I crawled up my dad as the snake was crawling up on the side of the mower.
There were several fishing trips where the water moccasins tried getting in the boat with us. One particularly scary time the snakes got after our fish on the stringer while we were fishing from inner tubes. We were miles from the truck and dad had to beat the snakes away with his fishing pole.
Last spring I was reaching up high on a shelf for a welding helmet and a little water moccasin crawled off the shelf and almost caused me to fall off the bucket I was standing on.
Another time I was cutting limbs off of a tree in the fence and a big cotton mouth crawled across my arm while I was sawing the limbs with the chainsaw. I couldn’t decide if I should throw the saw at the snake, saw up the snake or just drop everything and run away. Needless to say that big cotton mouth was gone before I could make up my mind. My heart was racing for a while after that though.
It’s that time of year again. I’ll be more cautious when I reach in a square bale to get a couple of pads for my horse or pick up anything on the ground. There’s almost always a snake under a board or piece of tin around the farm. I’ve had them inside my cab tractor, inside my pickup and curled up on a saddle in the tack room.
In Genesis 3:14 God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.
God must have been pretty mad at the snakes, he said they are cursed more than a cow and that’s saying something. That verse always gives me the willies when I get to studying on it. I don’t like snakes, especially the ones I don’t see…..
James Lockhart lives near the Kiamichi mountains in southeast Oklahoma. He writes cowboy stories and fools with cows and horses.
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