Mama and the bag of snakes

late Thirties or Very Early Forties, Paiute Mountain

One time Fritz and I were out hunting at the Squaw Pocket Claim. 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'd gotten a few quail that day, so we put the 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 that we had shot before. 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.