It was my senior year in high school. The sun was just rising over the Bolivar Peninsula to the east. I casually watched as a huge diamond-back rattler swam across a small salt-marsh pond and wormed his way into a duck blind occupied by me, a friend and a chocolate lab. We saw the snake coming, but didn't think anything about it until his head appeared at our feet between us. This snake was between 5 and 6 feet long and about as big around as my leg.
The blind platform was a 4' x 6' pallet that we had floored over with a sheet of plywood and there really wasn't room for all four of us. My friend grabbed the dog and bailed out the "door side" and I broke my way out through the the brush stacked at the other end. After some frantic maneuvering in knee-deep mud and water, we managed to get a clear shot at the head and dispatched the intruder. Took a while for our pulses to return to normal.
