I live out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by caliche hills dotted with prickly pear and yucca surrounded by oak and cedar woods, peppered with the occasional elm, mimosa, or sumac tree. Rattlesnakes are a real and present issue. Now, if one keeps the lawn mowed, the snakes move on through. If one lets the grass get tall enough for the snakes to hunt in, they will settle in for a stay. The problem is, i have a number of health issues that cause chronic fatigue, a day job two cities away that takes most of my daylight hours, and a number of stumps, rocks, and roots that cause me to keep the push mower setting on 3 instead of 0 so i dont ruin the blades and put a riding mower out of the question.
Pictured above is the second western diamond back rattlesnake that posted up under the water dispenser in the chicken pen. The first disappeared after i made a shit ton of noise mowing the whole property and destroyed his hunting grounds. This one took its place weeks later when the grass had gotten fairly tall again. Its been raining a lot this year, which im not complaining about, but what im saying is there’s been zero break in the need for mowing. Usually by now everything’s dry and dead. Its all vibrant and green this year, as much as weeds are gonna be green in a rocky cactus and yucca type environment. i texted my neighbor a picture of the snake and remarked that scaley buddy number 2 had taken up residence in the chicken pen…that it served me right for letting the grass get long again. He texted back asking me if i wanted him to take care of it. Now im going to try my best to explain what happened next in summary before i go into detail so that it makes sense because the series of mental gymnastics i went through in regards to this subject over the last month took a bit of dissecting for me to make sense of. I had texted back “yes please”. He told me to keep an eye on the snake, dont let it move from that spot, and he’d be over shortly. Its like 10 o clock at night now. For about 8 minutes i stood in the dark with a head lamp and stared at the snake, making sure it didnt move from the spot it was curled up in under the water dispenser in the chicken pen. Then i heard the big diesel work truck turn the corner at the intersection and pretty soon it was coming down the dirt driveway in the dark. The truck turned off. My neighbor/friend stepped out, brought his pistol full of rat shot over to where i stood, asked me which way it was facing, shined a flash light on it, stuck the pistol through the chicken pen fence right up in its business, fired twice, and then used a snake handling stick to drag it out of the pen where he requested a shovel. I handed him a shovel and after taunting me a bit with a dangling half dead snake asking “where you going? Where you going?” He cut its head off. He opened its mouth and showed me its fangs and its black tongue before officially beheading it. Then he threw it on the brush pile and it was gone in two hours. I dont know what critter made off with it but i went out to stare at it and it was gone, so somebody got a snack.
I told him he was a pretty nifty neighbor and thanked him profusely. he went home and went back to bed. I went inside and sat in the rocking chair to think on the evening’s events. I think i finally saw why people might want a husband. I never really fully understood the motivation behind that arrangement as my dad was not the sort that added to an operation but was more the sort to take. He’d take what he thought marriage entitled him to and he’d outsource any of his own responsibilities to add to it by hiring professionals. Well, i could hire professionals to fix things, build things, dig things, or make things. I had my own paycheck and i could hire people myself. So i didnt see the reason i had to put up with all the taking that i watched my mother put up with when i could get done whatever he brought to the table myself just fine. My neighbor came over in the middle of the night with a pistol full of rat shot, a flashlight, and a snake handling stick and he didnt just teach me how to kill a rattlesnake that night. He taught me what women see in cohabitation with men. I started thinking, well yeah, if you were cohabitating with someone who would kill rattlesnakes, copperheads, wild hogs, and rabid animals for you, was practiced and proficient with weapons, and got the job done without any hesitation or fan fare…well yeah, i’d value the shit out of that spouse. I recognized how quickly i’d gone from having a problem to not having a problem and for once, somebody took care of something and it wasnt me. Here’s where it gets a bit confusing. I realized, as nice as it felt to have something taken care of for me, and as much as i wished i was the kind of woman who could enjoy this pattern long term…we are flavored by the soup we are marinated in, and i didnt grow up privy to this pattern. It would probably be an easier and more enjoyable life if i did. I could find somebody to kill my snakes for me and make them food and do their laundry and it’d be a nice normal trade and i’d be part of normal society. I understood that i finally understood why people found it enjoyable to cohabitate, and what was in it for the woman. However, i also knew i was not mainstream enough to really join them in the enjoyment of it. I had a new thing to aspire to when it came to dating. I would look for a man who knew how to handle a pistol and a rifle and take care of critters. If they could catch fish and cicadas, that would be a definite bonus. But, there was a key piece of the puzzle, my personal puzzle, that was missing. I needed to know how to shoot. I needed to be able to handle my own critters. So that if someday somebody wanted to handle a critter for me, it wouldnt be out of pity or necessity…it would be to take something off of my plate because they cared and they had the ability. As much as i enjoyed my neighbor handling the problem and it gave me such peace of mind that it was done, i recognized that even though i found that nifty and valuable in other human beings; i needed to be able to do that myself so that i didnt feel needy or a burden to others. I needed to know in my heart that i could take care of the problem myself. And if in the future i met someone who wanted to shoot the rattlesnakes for me and he could do so without getting bit, i would appreciate the heck out of him, but id know he was doing it because he wanted to take that off my plate and protect me, not because i needed him to because i had no idea how to handle a gun. So i asked my neighbor if he would teach me how to do what he knew how to do. He graciously agreed.
I mowed the property the following day. I felt guilty for letting the problem come back. Plagued with chronic fatigue, im not always on top of this task and so i create a habitat that attracts such problems. Well i felt grateful that my neighbor would handle the problem but guilty that it was my fault it arose so i was going to mow the whole thing in one day if it killed me. And i did.
Well we picked a saturday and i went down to his 200 acre property and he brought a number of his guns and taught me how to hold, load, aim, and shoot both a pistol and a rifle, regular bullets and rat shot. he brought a number of rifles for me to try out, which i appreciated, because it gave me a chance to see which kind of rifle i liked… this was a rare opportunity for a woman bordering 40 who had never held a gun in her life. I was raised in the city and my family was more proficient with machetes than firearms. Guns were never a part of my life. I hadnt any idea how to hold one, carry one, or load one. I didnt know where to put my fingers, where to rest the butt of the gun… i was starting from point zero, and still my neighbor seemed up for the job of teacher. My other neighbor told me he had taught other peoples children in the community, as well as his own, how to shoot. She said that when people out here have skills they see it as their duty to pass them on to the next generation and if i was willing to learn, he was probably happy to impart his knowledge onto somebody who would use it. But i saw it as a great privilege to be able to mine his knowledge on the subject and have him impart this skill at this stage in my life, as most people around here knew how to shoot pretty accurately by the age of five and held their first rifle at the age of two. While city kids are playing with the fisher price kitchen and washing machine, farm kids are driving a battery powered tractor and learning how to hitch their toy boat to their toy truck. These kids know everything they need to know to run and repair real farming equipment by the age of 8 and when grandpa and papa are out there bailing hay or harvesting grain, there’s usually a family member under the age of 10 driving one of the vehicles entailed in the process and tracking the data to compare it to last year’s. I realize that this is a skilled area in which five year olds have me licked and i was grateful he was willing to help me change that. I also knew he was a damn good shot and knew his shit when it came to guns and ammo, so i trusted him as a teacher. I never wanted to just go take a class at a gun range. I wanted to learn from someone i trusted and have one on one teaching. It seemed like you’d get more of an education that way. Im glad i waited because as it turned out, my hunch was right. I didnt just want to be able to pass a course. I wanted to know everything that there was to know that i didnt know.
The first thing that i learned, that i probably wouldnt have learned in a gun range class, is that im near sighted, have an astigmatism, and neither eye is dominant. Both point inwards towards my nose slightly at rest. And there is a sweet spot where i can try to focus my eyes on something and it comes into focus…i need to take the shot within two minutes of that focus being achieved because after about two minutes the clarity will begin to become blurry and the longer i stare, trying to refocus my eyes, the blurrier the edges will get. So if i take the shot on an exhale within that two minutes window of achieving crisp focus, im pretty deadly accurate. If not, im off a bit to the left, right, up, or down. As he pointed out, it’d still be an accurate enough shot to drop anything i was aiming at on my two acre property, but if i wanted that bullet to go exactly where i was trying to put it, if i was aiming to shoot the eye out of something or for the center of their heart, i had better take the shot within that two minute window. I have a host of health issues that affect my vision and because my right eye is pretty dramatically no longer perfectly round (more visibly cone shaped on one side) where i perceive things to be line of sight is kind of a crap shoot…the edges are blurry and often seem to have a double edge and i am very near sighted so everything at a distance is blurred completely into crude shapes of different colors. He worked with me for a while and basically said he thought because of my sight issues i might be better with a scope. I was cutting the target out of the box by shooting all the edges of it in a near perfect outlined circle but a bullet hadnt touched the permanent marker ink yet. He handled me a rifle with a scope on it and i could suddenly see the target clearly. The picture was crisp through the scope. So he had me try three different rifles. There were the kind you had to load a clip into and use a bolt to put one in the chamber. There were also rifles you loaded by turning a little notch on the end of the rifle, sliding a piece out, and loading the bullets by sliding them down a long metal tube until there wasnt any room for more. Two of the rifles were pretty quiet. The pistols made a loud pop noise. The third rifle, ironically my favorite, made me deaf in my left ear for about two minutes and then half deaf in my left ear for about three weeks after. Thats when i realized i wanted a rifle that was pretty quiet because i couldnt hear critters or my patients speaking to me, and i wanted to be able to listen for danger or developments while shooting, i.e. not have to wear ear plugs. Well, i learned using his rifles that i had to pretty consistently line things ip in the crosshairs of the scope and then aim a bit low. I blew a hole in the center of the permanent marker target. He had me pick out some golf ball sized rocks and put them up on top of the cardboard box. I blew each one off the top of the box. Then he had me pick out a rock on the hillside on the other side of the dam and he wanted me to blow the rock apart. I did. He picked another rock. I did the same thing. We decided a scope is the way to go for me. Its a way for me to overcome my health issues and vision deficits. The scope sees the picture clearly for me. Now all i have to do is make sure im sitting comfortably with my weight where its going to be, pay attention to the crosshairs, have a steady hand and shoot on an exhale. Because most everything i see is blurry and the edges of things are a bit stretched out and fuzzy even with my glasses on, i am shit at shooting stuff line of sight. I can follow directions. So, if i have a spotter saying “a tad more to the left” or “9 o clock” i can make a logical decision on where to adjust the rifle stand or move the gun left or right, but im shooting blind basically. Im making no decision or where to put the bullet based on what my eyes are telling me. Im trusting the spotter. So, the scope was a game changer. Shooting became fun when i realized i could look through a little glass and plastic tube and blow up a golf ball sized rock across the dam on the other side of the creek from the cow field on the other side.
My neighbor said, “im impressed. You’re pretty good with a scope. Remind me not to make you mad.” I told him i was pretty sure there were rules against shooting the person who taught you how to shoot. He said, “okay, good.” Of course, if anyone ever wanted to get the upper hand on me all they’d have to do was break the scope and then i’d be shit outta luck cuz without it i cant see jack all. My neighbor said he’d take me to a gun show and we’d pick out a gun for just regular varmint and critter maintenance around the property. I was leaning towards a rifle instead of a pistol because i wanted to be able to shoot at coyotes with regular bullets as well as snakes with rat shot. Even though you could put rat shot or regular bullets in a pistol, you couldnt mount a scope to a pistol and i knew i couldnt shoot a coyote line of sight. We have 50 lb coyotes here, unlike the 30 lb ones my friend’s son killed last week in sonora because they were going after his turkeys. We have big wolf-sized coyotes and they behave as such. They are not scavengers. They take down full grown deer, full grown livestock, and they have no trouble eating a golden retriever sized dog. They pick their teeth with chihuahuas and cats. We have very few cats here. They eat them all. But thats a snack for them, not a meal. They will stand in the road and stare you down with bold yellow eyes. They are not afraid of humans and frequently drag their kill to peoples back doorsteps to eat it there in a sort of territorial show. Its like their way of saying “this is not your territory that i inhabit, its the other way around.” These things play mind games. They’re not timid little opportunists following you at a distance as you walk your chiweenie, darting behind trash cans and walls when you look back. It’d be good to have a rifle with a scope where i could put an accurate shot into one of these things if it was going after one of my dogs. They are bigger in size than cashew, my 40 lb aussie and they frequently traipse through my yard or my neighbors on both sides. I also need rat shot for rattle snakes. My neighbors said i could look through the scope and pop a raccoon or possum in the butt with rat shot if they were going after the chickens and though it wouldnt kill them, it would sting and they’d not come back again. While we were practicing i had a chance to use a bolt action 22 rifle and that was my favorite. I liked the clip. I knew exactly how many bullets were in, exactly how many were left, and i could pop it out to reload five more pretty easily, then just click it back in. I liked the motion required to clear the spent round and load a new one. I liked that you couldnt rack one if the safety was on because it physically blocked the motion. I liked how quiet it was and how little kick back there was. I didnt know enough gun related vocabulary at the time to be able to voice what i was looking for, but i was looking for a rifle that was as similar as i could get it to the favorite one i was allowed to try at my neighbor’s property. The small gun show at the veteran’s center was set to happen on my birthday. The larger one in kerrville was set for a month later and thats the one my neighbors wanted to go to, but i told him i was worried i’d miss it because it fell right within the calendar window of endometriosis day. If i didnt go to the small show and i missed the big show, i’d be waiting quite a while for a gun show to come back around. So my neighbor asked me last minute if i really wanted to go to that little show and i said yes and so he said he’d take me and we’d see if there was a rifle to our liking that would fit my needs.