Unwanted Guest: Rattlesnake Temporarily Interrupts Successful Muzzleloader Hunt

For years I’ve made fun of my hunting buddy over his irrational fear of snakes. I’ve repeatedly told him 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 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 season when I was blindsided by buzzing. I looked up to see a western diamondback rattlesnake just two feet away at eye level and ready 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 shot a 9mm bullet 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. I cut off the snake’s rattle and climbed into the blind with a new 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, 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 and bolted for cover, the buck hot on her trail.

I had just enough time to get my gun up and squeeze off a shot, but I lost sight of the buck when he 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 passed through 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.

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 stunned? No, that was too weak a sentiment. Was I shaken? That wasn’t right, either. Another word popped into my head then, but I dismissed it. 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 cliché as I felt, I had to admit that it was really the only word that could describe what I was feeling in the moment.

I was rattled…

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