Skippy was the dog on the ranch I worked on.
At night when we came back to the ranch house I would take an old .22 rifle and go out into the hay field by the house & shoot grey diggers (ground squirrels). There was hundreds of them in the rock piles there. We tried to keep them under control ‘cause they would knock the heads off the hay when they was runnin’ through the fields.
Well, this one time we was outta .22 shells ‘cause we hadn’t been into town for about a week, ‘cause ol’ Henry hadn’t run outta Cope yet. He could run outta cigarettes, no problem. He could run outta beer and we still wouldn’t go to town, but if he run outta Cope, we dropped everything and drove to town.
So on this day I dug around the gun cupboard and found two .22 shells. I figured I could get 2 grey diggers with those two shells. Well, Skippy decided he was goin’ with me for some durn reason. He was usually content to sleep on the porch after workin’ all day. I was tryin’ to send him back to the house but he wouldn’t go. All of a sudden he went to point as pretty as any million-dollar bird dog. I was laughin’ at this ol’ cow dog pointin’ at the ground, when about 6 feet in front of me I hear this ol’ rattler start buzzin’. I shot him in the head without consciously aiming. His head was just hangin’ on the rest of his body by a thin piece of skin.
It turned out to be the biggest snake anyone could ever remember seein’ on that ranch and the biggest one ever killed there. He was a full six-foot long and his rattles were broken off with only 11 rattles left on him. The biggest set from the ranch there was 15 rattles and a button, and my set was half again as wide as the set of 15. He was one big ol’ snake for a Timber Rattler!
After that ol’ Skippy was welcome to go squirrel huntin’ with me any time he wanted.
Dale
