Last April while out rockhounding with my brothers, I came up on a big, fat, brown rattler. He saw me before I saw him, I think, but he just kinda stayed put where he was on this big flat rock on the ground, at the base of a little juniper. He hardly moved and I thought he might be sick or something.
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<br>The day before, in The Grand Owyhee Cafe in Grandview, Idaho (the best pre-camping trip biscuits & gravy breakfast available anywhere, by the way) I'd looked for the hundredth time at the big framed set of rattler skins and decided I'd like to have one of my own.
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<br>So I picked up a big stick and mashed in this rattlesnake's head, and carried it back on the stick about two hundred yards to the truck near where my brothers were. We ooohd and aaahd around the snake for a few minutes--he was about three and a half feet long, with a real nice, deep brown color. We cut off his head and put it under a big rock, where my dog couldn't get it (my dog Jake thought the snake was pretty neat). Then I got out a razor blade from my kit and started cutting from the neck straight down the belly, and what I found I damn near can't talk about to this day without getting sick: that rattler had three little birds in his belly, and they all came out one at a time in the most nauseating, slimy, odious little bundles you ever saw. And boy, did it stink, and did that snake stink, and did my hands stink. Snake blood all over my fingers along with some kinda slimy snake-skin juice and snake fat...geesh! I've gutted deer and most lesser things and never gagged once, but I gagged and heaved about a thousand times gutting that snake after that first bird came out.
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<br>I got it done though, and he's still sitting in my freezer (well, now my mom's freezer, who's not crazy about it) waiting for me to get some glycerine and finish the job.
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<br>But I don't think I could ever eat a snake after going through that. Justin
