Rattled

This article was first published in the June 2024 issue of North American Whitetail magazine.

For years, I’ve made fun of my hunting buddy over his irrational fear of snakes. I’ve told him time and again that by the time deer season rolls around, snakes are looking for a spot to stay warm through the winter, not a spot to ambush hapless hunters. But my buddy still wears his snake chaps every October, and he flat refuses to hunt out of a ground blind that doesn’t feature a zip in floor. I was reaching down to open the door on one of those blinds the day before Halloween last year when I was blindsided by a buzzing. I looked up to see a Western Diamondback Rattlesnake just two feet away, at eye level and coiled to strike.

I slowly backed off, willing to let bygones be bygones, but the snake wasn’t having it. Neither was my hunting buddy. He wanted that rattler dead and beheaded. I eventually obliged him and emptied a magazine of 9mm bullets into the serpent. That took the fight out of the rattler, but at my buddy’s urging, I went ahead and squeezed the trigger on my muzzleloader, too, separating the snake’s head from his body. I cut off the snake’s rattle and climbed into the blind with a newfound appreciation for hunting hides with zip in floors. Between the time we’d lost getting into the blind and all the shooting I’d done, though, I wasn’t overly optimistic we’d see anything.

To my surprise, we had only been sitting a few minutes when deer began to move. A doe and her fawn were the first to show themselves. I scanned for movement behind them, but when I didn’t see anything, I pulled the diamondback’s rattle from the cupholder in my camp chair and shook it at them. They didn’t stay long.

Not long after they left, two button bucks ran in to feed. I knew their momma wouldn’t be far behind, but she took her time coming in, her head on a swivel and every one of her steps just shy of a stomp. The old doe stood guard as her twins tucked in at the feeder, and just about the time I began to appreciate her maternal instinct, a buck popped out of a mesquite thicket and charged her. The doe absolutely abandoned her twins then and bolted for cover, the buck hot on her trail. I was just able to get my gun up and squeeze off a shot, but I lost sight of the buck when ducked behind another stand of mesquite.

When he darted out again, I managed to mark him by one of the few true trees in southwest Oklahoma. Thinking I’d pick up his blood trail beside that tree, I was overjoyed to find my buck just beyond it. My bullet had pulverized his lungs and cut a channel across the bottom of his heart. Wondering when my own heart had last beat so hard, I took a knee beside my buck, but not before double checking that there wasn’t another snake in the vicinity, of course. Sweaty palms gripped the buck’s rack. I looked up at a Hunter’s Moon and searched for the words to articulate what I was feeling.

Was I shaken? No, that was too weak a sentiment. Was I stunned? That wasn’t right, either. Another word popped into my head then, but I dismissed it out of hand. Was I flabbergasted? Was I incredulous? That was closer to the mark for sure, but still not quite right. I circled back to the word I had dismissed, shook my head, and smiled. As much as I hated to use that word, as cliched as I felt, I had to admit that it was really the only word that could appropriately describe what I was feeling in the moment.

I was rattled.