Image via Wikipedia

(This is not my story.  Its my mother’s.  But its one of those family legends that needs to be preserved, so I asked her to write it down.  I was a child when this happened back in the fifties. – Pegasus)

I was a city girl, born and raised. I knew the fine art of city living. Then I got married and things changed. My husband, Red and I moved to Missouri and lived in a tiny house by the side of the road twelve miles north of Warrensburg. We had two acres. Red had a few hogs and I had bantam chickens and a big garden.

Red worked in Kansas City and worried about me and the girls living so far out in the country while he was at work so he bought us a rifle. He called it a .22 and it would shoot many bullets one right after the other one every time we pulled the trigger without reloading. Red would have target practice often. I think we were pretty good.

One day I went down to the chicken house to gather eggs and I saw a snake. I rushed back up to the house and got my trusty gun and hurried back to the chicken house. The snake was still there. She was busy climbing the back wall of the the chicken house and was a straight line half way up the wall.

I took aim and shot. I am not sure if I hit her or if I frightened her so much that she fell. Anyway there she was on the ground so I shot all my bullets into her and had to go back to the house to reload.

With a freshly loaded gun, I carefully aproached the chicken house again. My huge monster of a snake was still there but she had managed to crawl or slither or what ever snakes do, half way under the back wall, out of the chicken house.

I shot a few more bullets into that end of the snake and went behind the chicken house where the other end of the snake was still moving.   I shot a few more bullets and when Red came home from work, I  told him that I killed a snake.

He went to look. He laid her out and started counting one, two., three, and on and on.  Then he said, “A little two foot snake and you put twenty-four bullets in it.” I told him that I had to kill both ends.

Image via Wikipedia