As I said before, this
tale recently posted at Snopes reminds me of a story that I can use as an excuse to post something.
I don't know what those snakes are in those pictures, but they aren't copperheads. This is a copperhead.
The copperhead looks evil (the colors of a freshly-shedded copperhead are really quite vivid and beautiful), but unlike their aquatic cousin, the cottonmouth, they are not really aggressive. They will strike if bothered. Generally, if you unwittingly get any part of your body within striking range of one, it will become bothered.
I would like to make it clear before I start this story that I have nothing personal against copperheads. However, I grew up in a place that was literally infested with them. And, when you have small children running around who like to play in the sand barefooted and pick wild dewberries right off the vines, a venomous snake infestation can be a problem. Copperheads are excellent climbers, which is why I mention the dewberry vines. As I was growing up, I was taught to recognize and identify a wide variety of snakes. The rule was, if it's venomous, and you can kill it, do so. If it's non-venomous, leave it alone.
I think it was the summer of my fourteenth year. I was shredding the field out in front of the house with my dad's old Ford 8N tractor. I made a pass near a certain tree in this field, and noticed a copperhead. I stopped the tractor, walked over to the nearby fence where a pipe was leaning on a fence post, walked back and whacked the snake with it. I leaned it against a tree and continued on with my shredding. This pipe was metal, about 5 feet long, with a 90-degree elbow on one end. Most of the time we used this pipe for tamping post holes.
I made another circuit of the field, and when I neared that tree again, I saw another copperhead. At first I thought I had somehow managed
not to kill the first one, which confused me for a few seconds because I was sure I had left its head a bloody pulp. I glanced around and saw the first snake, so I realized there were two! I kept looking. Copperheads are very difficult to spot among dead leaves, and anywhere on our property where there were trees, there were leaves. A creepy kind of feeling went up my back. There were snakes
everywhere.
First, I retraced my steps back to the tractor and took a better survey from up on the tractor seat. Once I made sure I could walk around without stepping on one, I retrieved the pipe and started whacking snakes. In a few minutes I thought I had killed them all and started poking around for more.
The tree I was near had a small hollow beneath a root. I could see in the gloom of this tiny cave that the hole was seething with copperheads.
I decided to soften them up before moving in for close quarters combat, so I went back to the house and took down Dad's old single-shot 16 gauge and grabbed a few shells of birdshot. I fired into the hole a couple of times, and then started using the elbow on the end of the pipe to reach in and pull snakes out. The top layer of snakes had caught all the pellets, and their bodies had shielded the snakes deeper in the hole. So at first I pulled out some dead snakes, and some pieces of dead snakes. Then I started pulling out a lot of live, unwounded snakes.
That day I killed at least 24 snakes, and possibly as many as 27. I was uncertain as to the exact number because of the pieces that were left from the shotgun blasts (I couldn't be certain I had found every head and tail, so I wasn't sure). When I was finished, I lined all the dead snakes up and took a picture. The picture may still be around somewhere, I don't know. The last time I saw it, it was on display with lots of other family photos at a reunion.
My grandmother promptly had the photos developed, and took that picture along with the story to our local newspaper, the Stockdale
Star (now defunct). They printed it up, and within the next couple of weeks it was also carried by at least two other small-town newspapers in our county. That's about my only claim to fame. The caption for the story was, "Sandhill Boy Kills Copperheads by the Dozen."
During the next several years, I would go back and check the "snake hole" every summer, and I pulled several more snakes out of it each time, although never as many as the first time. In all, in the course of 5 or 6 years, I'm sure I pulled at least 60 snakes out of that hole.
The tree is still there, although the snake hole eventually succumbed to erosion and flooding and filled in with sand since then. Sometimes when I'm visiting Dad I still walk down to the old tree and reminisce.
