Dealing with Rattlesnakes

Besides the animals we hunted for food, we dealt with a lot of rattlesnakes. When we first moved to French Gulch everyone called it Rattlesnake Gulch. Lots of rattlesnakes there. We were all fairly young. I was probably about five. Fritz would then have been ten and Audrey eleven. Our neighbors used to kid us. “You oughta eat them rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes are good food.” Of course, not one of them had ever eaten a rattlesnake.

So, what did we know? We wanted to eat a rattlesnake. Mom was gone when we found a rattlesnake in the foundation of the cabin. We dragged it out and killed it and decided to eat it. Mom was raised in a finicky house, even though she was very open minded and we ate all kinds of things. But we knew she wouldn’t really want to eat the snake. So we took action. We knew you were supposed to soak the snake in salt water, so we put it in a soup tureen filled with brine. It was a lovely tureen. It had a lid and everything. When Mama came home the four of us, Beverly (she was there, too), Audrey, Fritz and I, lined up and said, “Mama, we want to cook this.”

We took the lid off the tureen and Mother said, “NO!”

We all cried in unison. It was well rehearsed. She finally said, “Oh, dammit. Look, I’m going up on the hill. And don’t tell me which pan you used.” So we dried off the salt water, cut it up into two-inch sections, rolled it in egg and flour and fried it. My siblings had me eat the first piece. Just in case. Being the youngest child, what did I know?

Ever after that we ate rattlesnake, if they were fat. There are a lot of bones in a rattlesnake, and if it doesn’t have meat on it, it’s not worth the work. We became known for eating rattlesnakes, and in our wanderings over the mountains when we found a rattlesnake we killed it. Now I wouldn’t do that. Kids do stupid things.

We only met two rattlesnakes that were really mean. One of them, I don’t know what had gotten into him. He was beside the road and something must have gotten him upset. We were walking beside the road minding our own business and he coiled up. Then he started to come towards us. We rarely used a gun for a snake. It was a waste of ammunition. We broke their backs with a stick and then cut their heads off with a knife. We all carried knives.

Another time a rattlesnake that had been eating something, trying to swallow it, and apparently it wasn’t warm enough. A cold blooded animal’s temperature depends upon ambient temperature, and they have to have a certain temperature to eat. You can’t put something into a cold oven. Apparently this snake had swallowed it and threw it up, and it was really pissed. He came after us, so we did him in.

Usually the snakes tried to get away. Fritz stepped on one once. It started to rattle and then stopped, like it was embarrassed and shouldn’t have done that. We used to tell visitors that the first person in line wakes it up, the second person makes it mad, and the third person gets bit. In all our years up on Paiute, no one we knew, let alone us kids, ever got bit.

We were always killing rattlesnakes, and we had snake hides. We’d skin the snake out and tack up the hide and add a little salt. Then you’d make a hat band out of it, or you’d give it away, or something. Sometimes we’d just cut the rattles off and save them. Like I say, in this day and age, I would never do this, but kids, what the heck.

One time Fritz and I were out hunting quail out at the Squaw Pocket clain. There was a rock face about ten feet high and twenty feet wide. It was actually a huge boulder pile, but the boulders were very large. This rock face had a split about five feet up. As we walked by a snake fell out of the split. We jumped back and thought, “Jeez, where’d that snake come from?” We looked up and there were other snakes sticking out, too. Apparently it got too crowded up there and this one slipped and came down. So we killed him. Then we got a long stick and started pulling out snakes. Once on the ground, we killed them. We had quite a pile of snakes.

We got about seven or eight snakes that day. Interestingly enough, they were all different colors. They all had the patterns, but some were palish pink, others were palish green. Apparently they had all been shedding and the underlying coat colors were a little different.

We’d gotten a few quail so we put these snakes in the same bag with the quail and took them home to mother. We didn’t tell her what was in the bag and she was unhappy. She berated us.

Mother made us throw the snakes out. We had a deer hanging. We had skinned it out some distance from the cabin and had quartered it up. I guess we gave half of it away. It was fairly fresh, only three days old. Mother told us to get rid of those rattlesnakes and take them a long way from the cabin. Well, you know kids. We went over the hill a little ways and threw them behind a rock where we hoped she wouldn’t find them. Soon the buzzards started circling. We were certain it was the rattlesnakes, but mother thought it was the deer. When she found out it was the snakes, well, we didn’t get a paddling, but we got a dressing down.

On another day we went back and got another six snakes. All in all, we got fourteen snakes out of that nest. We killed them all. That’s what kids do sometimes.

Copyright Joanne Heyser Harris 2009