Dad took out a handkerchief and cleaned his glasses.
Fred brought himself up about as close as he dared to the snake and again
fixed his glare of hatred upon those evil eye-slits. Fred did not really
have what you’d call evil eye-slits himself, but the snake didn’t have
bushy black eyebrows to scowl with, so up to this point, it was about a
draw.
Fred drew the hammer back over his head in a long wind up, then sent it
crashing down to the ground.
Unfortunately,
it WAS only a claw hammer, not something with a long handle, and it WAS a
large snake that you wouldn’t want to stand too close to, so due to his
caution, the hammer struck the earth several inches short of it’s mark in
front of the snake.
The snake, unaccustomed to any creature that didn’t show it a sensible
amount of respect, didn’t even flinch. He just glared back with every bit
as much hatred for Fred as Fred had for him.
Fred paused a moment, steeling himself for a more aggressive attack, then
stepped a few millimeters closer and, without warning, launched what was
intended to be a quick and brutal volley of several murderous strikes that
were intended to turn the snake into a bloody ribbon of white flesh and
cold blood. In considerably less time than it takes to tell about it, the
hammer fell once and missed, twice and hit the ground, three times and it
connected with a body blow to the snake far from the head.
The snake’s body, probably from reflex after the fierce blow, sprang out
of it’s coil and became entangled in the claws of the hammer so that, when
Fred made his next frenzied upstroke of the hammer, he brought one
extremely agitated copperhead up with it.
In that split second, his natural reaction was to let go of the hammer,
and Fred, being no hand to thwart nature, let it go.
My father never tires of describing the look on Fred’s face, or the odd,
little-girl screech that came bleating from his throat in that instant of
truth when he looked up to realize that he had just thrown a two-pound
claw hammer and a six-foot copperhead straight up into that beautiful
spring sky, directly over his own head, and that both were now on their
way back down.
Personally, I think it’s better to just live and let live. If we kill all
the snakes, who then, will we get to swallow all those field mice?
