“The Road to Castolon”
This scene is on the western side of the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend National Park. The road in the painting goes to Castolon, a tiny village on the Rio Grande River. This road roughly follows the old trail used by the Comanche Indian raiding bands going to Mexico to steal horses and children.
There is something in my soul that so enjoys a vast and magnificent scene such as this one. The morning when I was there earlier this spring, I imagined that I was watching a band of Comanche warriors in the distance coming down the trail. For my three day trip out there, I had the back end of a SUV loaded with stuff. The Comanche warriors would be gone for about six months but would need a whole lot less baggage. The only things each one took along were his horse, the clothes on his back, a blanket, a knife, a lance and his bow and arrows.
As I was painting the two coyotes coming up the hill in the painting, I remembered a coyote hunt long ago that went bad, in a hurry.
One Sunday morning, my buddy and I were bored and wanted something exciting to do so we decided to borrow my dad’s predator caller and go coyote hunting down on the Old Walcott Ranch about twenty miles south of Catarina, Texas. My buddy, Bobby, was a big guy about six feet four inches and weighed well over two hundred pounds. My dad had a .22 caliber High Standard semi-automatic pistol with an extra long barrel that I really liked so I took it along.
The decision to take that pistol on this hunt would change my life and save the life of my friend Bobby. You know, teenage boys never consider that something bad or life threatening will ever happen to them. They are “bullet proof” and are going to live forever.
During my growing up years in the 1950s in Southwest Texas , it was considered a good thing to hunt predators such as coyotes. It was considered a sport to hunt coyotes with a little device called a “predator caller.” It was a little horn-like device that you could blow through and make a loud sound like an animal (such as a rabbit) that has been caught by a predator and was squealing. My Dad was really good at using a predator caller and taught me how to do it. Every type of predator such as cougars, coyotes, bobcats, hawks, owls and snakes, could be called up, so when using the predator caller, you had to be careful because the predator being called up could mistake the person doing the calling as the prey. Sometimes the hunter became the hunted.
The Old Walcott Ranch had about 26,000 acres deep in the South Texas brush country of Webb County. It was owned by my Dad’s business partner so we could go hunting there anytime. About 3,000-acre section of the ranch was on the west side of US Highway 83 and was all in one pasture called The Almood Pasture. This pasture was named after the Almood Mountain which was at far western corner of the ranch. For those of you not familiar with how much land is in 3,000 acres, it is approximately five square miles with no cross-fencing.
We got down there in the early afternoon and drove about a mile into the pasture and parked the pick-up truck near Rices Creek. This was a dry creek bed about eight feet deep. The ranch road stopped there because it was difficult to maintain a road across the sandy creek bed. However, cow trails crossed the creek bed (although they were still difficult to walk on because they were steep and sandy).
We crossed the creek and walked about 500 yards to some brushy rocky ledges where we could see out over some ravines. I sat down behind some bushes and Bobby sat down about ten yards a way on the other side looking the other direction. After letting things quiet down a bit, I got the predator caller out and gave it a good blow: “WWWAAAA!!!!!, WWWAAAA!!!, WWWAAAHHH!!!!” After about fifteen minutes, nothing had happened, so I called again “WWWAAAHHH!!!, WWWAAAHHH!!!”
Sitting there behind a bush, everything was very quite. Suddenly, I heard a slight movement behind me which I thought was Bobby shifting his weight. I heard it again and I slowly turned around to see what was going on. A big coyote was standing about half way between Bobby and me. He was looking at Bobby. I could also see Bobby looking back over his shoulder at the coyote. Then the coyote looked at me. Since the coyote was directly between us we couldn’t shoot at it and it didn’t want to leave, I guess it was looking for that rabbit.
Both Bobby and I jumped up. Bobby, the coyote and I did a little dance in the brush. We were trying to shoot at it without shooting at each other. Finally, the coyote disappeared in the thick brush and got away without either of us firing a shot. For a few minutes, though, it was really exciting. However, the real excitement was yet to come.
Something else had also come to the party.
Since there had been so much commotion here, we decided to move to another place to do some more calling. Bobby started walking down a cow path and I was following, looking at the ground. He was looking back over his shoulder talking about how exciting that had been and he stepped right over a huge rattlesnake that was stretched across the cow trail.
The snake, well over six feet long, pulled back into an “S” coil with its head up about knee high between us to strike at the back of Bobby’s leg. Bobby, as yet, had not seen the snake and was still talking. Its head, pointed at Bobby’s leg, was about 12 inches directly in front of my knee. Reacting without thinking, I instantly pulled out the .22 pistol and put the end of the barrel on top of the snake’s head and pulled the trigger. Immediately, all hell broke loose.
The snake struck, but my shot had deflected his strike, and its fangs got hung up in Bobby’s pants leg. The snake’s rattlers suddenly sounded like a loud buzz saw. Its body and rattlers were writhing around on my feet. Bobby was now screaming and trying to get away from the rattlesnake that was hung up on his pants leg. After a lot of commotion we got the snake unhooked from his pants leg, but now the snake was striking in every direction. There was thick brush and prickly pear was on both sides of the cow trail, so Bobby, the snake, and I did not have a lot of room to maneuver. By the time Bobby and I got away from the enraged rattlesnake, I was shaking so bad that I had difficulty holding the pistol steady enough to shoot at the snake. After a lot of shooting, we finally killed the snake.
After we calmed down some, we decided to just go home. We didn’t talk about it much. However we both knew that if the rattlesnakes strike had not been deflected by my .22 pistol shot and had actually struck Bobby’s leg instead of his pants leg, it could have been fatal because of where we were. I would have had a lot of difficulty getting Bobby across the Rices Creek bed and to the pickup truck. Then we were still about forty five miles from the nearest hospital in Laredo, Texas . There was also a good possibility that the snake could have bitten both of us.
It was one of those learning experiences where two teenage boys began to learn that things can go bad in a hurry and there is no guarantee that they will live forever.
Cheers,
Acree
<< Back to Email
Archive Page >>
|
