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Pastimes : FLAME THREAD - Post all obnoxious/derogatory comments here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (6084)	9/24/1998 3:00:00 PM
From: Druss	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 12754

Solon--A touching story. Perhaps you are right I should share some gentler memories. Gigging Snakes A common food in the South is frog legs. These are normally obtained by going out at night with a spear known as a gig and a flashlight and spearing them. Frogs in Texas and the Northern state above them [How is that Lee?] had legs the size of chickens. The gigs were consequently heavily built with barbs on the points. One night while Sandy and my Dad followed the dogs, Bruce and Kent, Sandy's older boys and I went to Cash Creek to hunt frogs. We found no frogs at all but like any small body of water in the area it was lined with water moccasins. Simply hundreds of them and nearly all around 2 1/2 feet long or better. Invariably moccasins would coil up and wait for us as we came walking up. So here are three boys ages 9, 10, and 11 (me) with gigs, no frogs to spear, and snakes everywhere. I can't claim the idea to gig them was mine, it was a natural evolution of the available components. However I was the one who came up with the idea of getting them off the gigs. The gigs being barbed held the snakes a little too well. So after a successful jab one had a venomous reptile in bad temper, securely caught. So what I came up with was to grab the end of the gig pole (which was about 6 feet long and looked just like a broomstick) and sling the snake off into the trees lining the shore. This worked pretty well for a dozen or so and then one came off a little prematurely. The damned thing went straight up. We flashed our lights up and caught a glimpse of a white belly flash and that was all. We didn't know where I had launched him or where to run. The only thing we knew for certain was he wasn't going to come down in a good mood. So we crouched and waited for this three foot raindrop from Hell to hit. It smacked down a couple a feet from me. Fortunately he was a little worse for wear and we could evade him easily. After that we talked things over and decided we could be doing something a little wrong and that maybe certain problems could arise if we continued to do this. So we decided to stop hurling them and go to a less spectacular method of release. After gigging one we would take him over to the crotch of a tree, put the gigged snake in the fork and put another gig or a stick across the top and then pull the spear out. It worked great. At least it would have worked great if we hadn't made a strategic error. We were moving downstream, we hadn't considered that a problem until we were standing knee deep in the creek and saw a previously gigged moccasin coming downstream. Somehow this broken backed snake had made his way back into the stream and he was so mad he was striking blind at the water. He was just a few feet from Bruce when he spotted him. Bruce tended to get hysterical when he felt he was in danger of being killed and right away he let us know he felt that way in spades. Kent and I tended to agree with him and saw no reason to include the two of us so we headed for shore watching the action on the move so to speak. The snake got so close to Bruce that the water swirl pulled it even closer as Bruce began accellerating to high turn of speed. If the gig hadn't done a good amount of damage to the snake I think it would have nailed him. Its coordination seems to have suffered though and it missed. This instance left us in the position of having to reassess what we were doing once again. Going downstream was obviously the problem. However none of us, particularly Bruce, wanted to work our way back upstream and reintroduce ourselves to any of the snakes we had speared earlier. So we reluctantly headed back toward the car overland. All in all we felt it was a good day even if we hadn't gotten any frogs. Druss