Daniel Rousseau

The Hunted

           1959. The night was blacker than cats-a-fightin’ as Tommy Ringer and I rolled along the deserted back roads of Citrus County in the old Model-A Ford pickup truck we had converted to a swamp buggy. We were headed for trouble and didn’t know it.

          Gone were the Model-A’s original 21” rims. We bounced along on four airplane tires that gave us height and mobility in the woods. By attaching chains we could go just about anywhere. The old headlights barely swallowed up more than fifteen yards of darkness at a time, and that’s assuming they worked at all. Every jounce along the cracked macadam road jiggled the connecting wires, but we forged ahead, safe in knowing nobody else was fool enough to sacrifice precious sleep-time so as to train dogs to hunt raccoons in the middle of the night.

          Between Lake Panasofkee and the little town of Inverness lay an expanse of some of the best hunting land in Florida, especially for a couple of ‘coon hunters. It was a paradise of lakes and ponds, studded with oak and pine and cabbage palm. Interspersed through it all were open expanses of palmetto. Every kind of game was there — deer, turkey, bear, wildcat, quail, and dove. Even a few panthers still roamed that area of the state. But ‘coon hides were a cash crop and it was ‘coons we were after. 

          High above each front fender, welded to the buggy’s frame, were a couple of “shooter’s-seats,” metal seats we’d salvaged from derelict John Deere tractors. In daylight they provided grandstand views of whatever we hunted. At night we sat up high enough to keep our night vision.  

          I rode in the seat above the right fender, my .22 rifle cradled across my lap. The humid September night tugged warm against my face and arms. On either side of the road, barely visible in the poor light, a rancher’s hog-wire fence stretched for miles, a blurred honeycomb of pewter wire punctuated by cypress fence posts.

          It was Tommy, staring straight ahead through the windshield, who saw the ‘coons dart across the road in front of us from left to right. 

          “Hot damn, hang on,” he yelled as he braked onto the right shoulder. “Did you seem ‘em?”

          “See what?” I asked, grabbing the edge of my seat.

          “A mama coon and six or seven young’uns.” The engine hadn’t coughed and sputtered to a full stop before Tommy unlatched the first dog cage at the rear of the buggy. The three coon-hounds caught the excitement of the coming hunt and began baying. 

          “Get on the other side of the fence and I’ll hand ‘em over to you.” Tommy held a full-grown dog in his arms.

          Small game can easily scoot through the five inch squares of a hog-wire fence, but it’ll stop a dog and strangle him. A hound follows scent without worrying about wire. But with his head poking through, he fights it and gets tangled. It can cut him badly or kill him before you know it.

          I unloaded my rifle and laid it on the front seat. I clipped the battery of my hunting light to my cartridge belt and adjusted the headlamp band around my head so the miner’s light shone from the middle of my forehead.

          “Hurry up,” Tommy urged, hoisting the dog before I was ready. “Those ‘coons will be all the way to Lake Okeechobee before you know it.”

          I took my time. The fence was about shoulder high, too high to jump. I rested my hand on the post and came forward with a springing step, then shifted my weight to the top of the post and rolled over the top.

          What happened next remains a blur. I cleared the wire and my 180 pounds thudded into the tall palmettos. To my left, nearly beneath my feet, an explosion. High-pitched buzzing. Like a thousand angry bees. Not bees. Rattlesnake. I froze. Knees bent, arms outstretched. The head-lamp snapped loose and dangled alongside my left jawbone, its beam playing back and forth across the toes of my boots.

          Time crawled. Tommy dropped the dog and reached for his shotgun. The hound rammed its head through the hog-wire and strained against the fence, baying as if he’d treed every ‘coon in Florida. Tommy cocked the twelve-gauge and adjusted his miner’s lamp.

          Light flooded me.

          “Hot damn,” he swore. “Don’t flinch, or he’ll get you.”

          I never so much as rolled an eyeball. But I oozed fear. Oozed it like a rabbit caught in a snake’s trance.

          “I mean it. Don’t move. I’m gonna fire right in front of your face. Lean forward you’ll get hit.” Tommy rested the shotgun on the fence post where my hand had been. The eye of the barrel widened as it moved closer, above and to the right of my head. 

          “Just kill him, dammit,” I muttered through my teeth. Crouched as low as I was the fangs could easily strike me anywhere – arm, leg, or worse. Poison hitting my neck or head, I was dead. “Shoot the damn thing!”

          Tommy squeezed the trigger. The muzzle flashed. Buckshot blew past my face. My right ear deafened, my cheek burned. 

          “Got him,” he yelled. But I already knew it. The frenzied rattling subsided with each convulsion of the dying snake, like a child’s metal toy winding down to a quiet clatter, only to spring to life with brief, final spasms. 

          I stood up slowly, testing my jellied knees. 

          “I told you I got him,” Tommy said, as he pulled the hound away from the fence.

          “I know,” I replied, adjusting my headlamp and shining it all around me. “Just checking.” Snakes traveled in pairs and another one couldn’t miss the dead rattler’s gangrenous musk that choked the air like a morning fog.

          I managed to cross the fence again before Tommy remembered the dead diamondback. 

          “How about grabbing the rattler while I get this dog back in the cage?”

          “Tommy, I thank you for saving my butt, but I’m not touching that damned snake. You want him, you go get him.”

          He did, hoisting it up by the rattles. The head twirled from the few strands of skin keeping it attached. The mouth gaped open and the pearl-white fangs glistened in the light of our headlamps. Tommy tried handing the snake to me, but the best I’d do was hold open a burlap bag for him to drop it into. Even without the head the snake measured six feet long. Since a rattler can strike a distance two-thirds its length, the entire time I remained crouched there in the palmettos, I felt I was the hunted.

          As I cranked the Model-A, Tommy glanced at his watch. “Hey, we still got some time left before the moon comes up. What do you say we turn the dogs loose?”

          “That snake said it all,” I told him. “I’m done hunting for tonight.” Actually, I was pretty much finished with it altogether. That was the third time within weeks that a rattlesnake had nearly bitten me. Two months later, in November, I met a girl on a blind date and married her in March. Shortly after that I sold my purebred Redbone hound to a feed salesman who broke him of hunting ‘coons and made a deer-dog out of him.

          Tommy was happy with his new rattlesnake belt and hatband, and sported them everywhere. He was welcome to them. He even dried the snake’s skull with the fangs extended in the strike position. He mounted it on the dashboard of the hunting buggy.

          I didn’t need any souvenirs. Escaping death that night in Citrus County was the only memento I needed.

Money Art, Valerie Brown Woven Photograph