My Days As A Snake Hunter

My family’s been hunting snakes down around Lake Pepin for generations. My old man’s from one of the longest lines of snake hunters in the entire country, in fact. My mother’s own family was famous in those parts for creeping in caves, and the snake hunting, I gather, was sort of a natural off-shoot of the spelunking.

There were also shoplifters –chronic shoplifters– on both sides of the family. From my experience snake hunting and shoplifting go hand in hand. That’s just a plain fact, and it would do me no good to deny it. Everyone around there knew it as well, but most of my kin were such accomplished shoplifters that they were damn hard to catch nonetheless.

That said, snake hunters, I think you’d find, are for the most part pious folk, scared to death of the Lord God. I recall once asking my old man to resolve that contradiction for me –the compulsion to shoplift coupled with the fear of the Lord– and I’ll admit to being somewhat disappointed by what I took to be his lazy answer: “Let them who is without sin cast the first stone,” he said. My father could generally and reliably be counted on to come up with something more unpredictable and off-the-wall than that.

Snake hunters are also by and large proud Americans and in favor of just about any war at all. Make no mistake about it: if called upon they’ll serve their country proudly, and many of them don’t even need to be called upon. There’s not much money in snake hunting, quite honestly, and shoplifting can only elevate a man in the world so far.

At any rate, a disproportionate number of the members of my usual snake hunting posse would have American flag patches sewed on their jean jackets or baseball caps, and some of them had tattoos reflective of their generally hostile attitudes regarding belligerent foreigners.

So, yes, I suppose some of what you’ve heard about us is true: we’re bellicose folk, and we see our dogged pursuit of snakes as symbolic of God’s war with Satan here on earth. We’re not all cut from the same mold, though. We’ve got our share of non-conformists. Some of us like to do creative and even eccentric things with our facial hair, and you might be surprised by the distinctive taste in eyewear that is characteristic of some of our more accomplished hunters, not to mention the various sartorial idiosyncrasies you’d doubtless take note of if you were ever to actually come snake hunting with us instead of just getting your stereotypical and misguided impressions from the liberal media.