Oglethorpe
Scott Mclean
Nerve spasms so here’s another jewel.
I should mention that nobody reading any of this should get the idea that it’d be good to try and emulate any of the stupid and dangerous things my brother and I got up to. Not only are they dangerous and likely illegal by today’s standard, but I’m fairly certain we only got away with them because they had not invented the consequences for that level of stupidity yet.
We were changing sprinklers for the neighbors and inadvertently washed out a pheasant nest. We took the eggs home and put them under a light but only one survived.
I dubbed him Oglethorpe.
We didn’t know for sure that it was a male but ended up being right. Oglethorpe matured into a full ring neck rooster. We would occasionally sneak him into the house. Anyone who has been around pheasants much knows that when they take off they normally leave a string of bird crap. He would sometimes fly when we got him in the house and the bird, along with both of us, got in trouble.
Oglethorpe eventually escaped from the pen we had for him or whatever critters we happened to be enthralled by at the time. I still have a suspicion that Mom let him out.
The cage sat on top of the carport-patio and now had no occupants. We knew we’d have to remedy that.
At the time, there was an old guy on Thompson road who would pay us for rattlesnakes that he would skin to make bands for cowboy hats.
Lower Cowiche Canyon, where the trail is now, only had railroad tracks at the time.
All the locals called the old locomotive that plied it Sagebrush Annie.
The Canyon had and still has an abundance of rattlers. This made for good fishing because sensible people didn’t want to mess with them.
We came up with our snake catching method on one of these trips. Rattlers usually will head away from you unless surprised or aggravated. We made a noose of fishing line at the end of our poles. We would let the snake crawl into the noose and jerk it tight. As gruesome as it seems, as long as the line was in good shape you could basically behead the snake which was the safest way to deal with it.
Not that an 11 and 8 year old messing with rattlers was safe!
One day we were feeling flush from our irrigation money and bored with the 2 bucks a snake we were getting paid. We had the wonderful idea to catch one alive and keep it.
We carried it all the way home squirming at the end of the fishing pole.
The cage had a new tenant!
Mom seldom went out on the elevated patio unless she was barbecuing or we had a summer family function. We carefully put mice in for the snake who still did not seem impressed by our overtures of friendship. We had it for between 3 weeks and a month.
One day, Mom happened to wander by the cage. She was used to us having some creature or another in there. The snake started rattling and struck at the wire.
Bad move for the snake.
Mom shot our snake and warmed our hind ends up.
I’ll touch on the subject of Steve introducing Mom to Hot wheel tracks later.
Bye for now.