Looking for a Rufous

Sometimes, it’s just plain luck or timing that saves the moment. That’s the way it was that sultry, summer day in the river bottoms of southeast Texas. It started out peaceful enough, just a bunch of Boy Scouts on a field trip. Many of us, as you might expect from kids growing up in a small, one-horse town where the only source of amusement was a single indoor theater, a drive-in theater, and a couple of drive-ins (more like “drive-arounds”) with carhops no less, were lovers of nature.

At one point, there was also a bowling alley, but that burned to the ground a few years after it was built.

But it was a lucky day, especially for “Lucky”, the squirrel. But I’m getting a little ahead of my story. If you’ve spent any time in the Texas woods, you know about the snakes. Yessir, enough to make any Freudian fool giggle with delight, or a person with snake phobias might just lie in bed on sleepless nights with cold beads of sweat on their brow.

Go figure how a Cottonmouth Water Moccasin weighing several pounds could climb high up in an Oak tree, nary a branch to be found close to the ground, climb into a squirrel’s nest, grab him for lunch, and bail.

WHOOOMPPPHH!!!

That was the sound we heard or something like that. Up until that moment, we were just walking through the woods appreciating nature and horsing around. Many of us knew about the snakes in the river bottoms, although our relationships with the creatures were often punctuated by looking down the barrel of a .22 caliber rifle and pulling the trigger. As I was saying, there wasn’t much to do in Liberty, so you invented your own entertainment, often at the expense of the wildlife.

But let’s get back to Lucky who at the moment is being eaten for lunch. With part of his body already in the snake’s mouth, he was starting to get a bit anxious, given the fact that this was not his idea. Scoutmaster Bill took out his machete and ended the snake’s lunch and life by removing his head. You could almost hear a sigh of relief as we removed the living, breathing squirrel from the snake’s mouth, or more accurately removed the severed head from the squirrel.

Duly named “Lucky” the squirrel lived out his remaining years at the home of the scoutmaster.