[Preface—the original version of this story is four pages long. I’m hacking it up.]
The Ultimate Fish Story
Saturday of Mother’s Day weekend, 1996, I ate supper with my brother and gram… Gram and I decided to go fishing after, while my brother opted to go hunting in a different direction on the ranch.
Gram and I got to the tank. I cracked a beer, Gram spun the feeder out in the middle of the bridge… the pellets hit the glassy, still water… and it was time to fish.
Gram elected to bobber fish for cats from the bridge. I chose to lure fish for bass, and cast up and down the bank. Things are going well; I had caught my first bass about 7 p.m. it was a 3.5 pounder, for sure… stringered it up, and immediately got another strike on a bass about the same size. Got it up to the bank, was making the last ditch pull to flop it up onto the mud, when I pulled the lure right out of its mouth… it flops twice and is gone in an arrogant comma of muddy water. I’m hopping mad, saying things I hope Gram can’t hear, and slinging my lure around like some demented gremlin, when I realize
“the fish are hungry. If you bait him, he will come…”
About that time, my brother appears from a copse of mesquite, waves at me, and joins Gram on the bridge, approximately 150’ from where I stood.
And it was just that very second that I felt a weight on my foot.
I froze, instinctively—and rolled my eyeballs down slowly, slowly—to see the biggest cottonmouth I had ever seen on my left boot. She looks at me [fliiiiittt goes her tongue, as she observes me coldly] and I look at her…
About this time, another part of my brain hears my gram excitedly calling to my brother… “Look at the size of THAT monster… there goes another one, over by the stump…” as they observe a nest of snakes coming up to feed on the fish who are surfacing for the feeder pellets
My eyes roll back down to my boot tips, which just touch the water. In quick succession pop up three more heads… momma’s young uns.
I can’t scream, I can’t move, all I can hear is my Dad telling me to REMAIN COMPLETELY FROZEN STILL.
Suddenly, a shotgun blast rips across the tank as my brother starts shooting snakes.
I of course jerk. Snake coils up on boot like a bullwhip. Another KABBBLAAM and I jerk again. She’s weaving and bobbing now. I close my eyes and start saying my rosary on speed dial, trying to remember how far it is to the hospital.
Some indeterminate time later, the babies swim off for my stringered bass…
Some indeterminate time after that, momma starts to slide off after them.
I dropped my rod and ran, I couldn’t help it, my nerve had broken.
I was running like Carl Lewis until I heard Gram calling me.
[o @#%&, she’s coming straight for a nest with an angry momma]
I stop, try not to throw up on my boots, catch my breath, and yell for her not to move.
I swallow several times, make my way back, inching along the fence line with my back to the barbed wire until I get back to the truck, and the guns. I take my brother more shells.
[He needs LOTS more shells… I feel like Roy Scheider in Jaws when he says “we’re going to need a bigger boat”]
And then I hear my brother say something so incredible I believe I’ve totally lost my mind, or that this is all just some horrific dream.
“I gotta shoot one and stick it up in the tree so it will rain.”
I looked at him like he had just told me that if he danced naked in the middle of the mall on Monday, purple ducks would come to live in my yard.
Sure enough, he starts KABBLAAMMING away at more snakes… which are sssing their way across the water like silent, deadly, living torpedoes.
The problem with his plan, of course, is that when you shoot a snake, it sinks… so he walks over to the nearest mesquite and starts swinging like apeboy on one of the lower branches until it cracks off… he has something that looks like a six-foot backscratcher, and walks up to the edge of the water, stirring about like Betty Crocker [the gun is on the ground BEHIND HIM and I am thinking this is an Inherently Bad Idea
When like some malignant jack-in-the-box, a cottonmouth head the size of your closed fist pops up directly by his right hand and I scream, and scream, and scream, and scare him so badly he drops his stick, which now has a five-foot cottonmouth swirled around it in a lover’s embrace, and KABLAAAM he shoots it, but it’s not dead… he flips it up onto the bank, and it comes off that stick and goes after him… brother picks up the stick and does this incredible spear hunter imitation and stabs it three times… he picks it up and puts it up in the tree… and I’m on the verge of fainting at this point… I fall on my butt on the bridge, and another four-footer is looking up at me from between the planks… I’m convinced I’m in some bizarre Alfred Hitchcock movie entitled “the Snakes”…
My brother shot four more…
I slept with my boots on all night.