I’ve heard some great stories over the years from all the circles I’ve traveled. Each tale creates its own image in my head that sometimes makes its way onto some paper or a napkin, just to see for a second how it could have played out, I guess.
Ranches I’ve worked for generally employ at least one great storyteller — some windier than others — but performers in their own rights. One of the stories I hears which stuck with me over the years was told to me by a cowboss who runs country near the Canadian River Breaks.
When I pulled into camp the first time, the boss showed me his tank of live rattlers, all buzzing and coiling each time you walked around that side of the porch. Eventually, we got into the what’s and how’s of keeping rattlers. Feeding them was kind of the question I was wondering about, and that’s when I was informed that there’s no shortage of mice around the area. Even some of the oil pumpers who knew about this camp and his snakes have dropped off mice and rats that were caught red-handed in their equipment.
As it goes, one of the pumpers had brought a mouse for the cowboss’s snakes, and both men watched as the rodent was lowered into the glass tank, fully expecting to see the inevitable. What happened next is what has stayed with me for some time.
Apparently, when the snake struck the mouse, the mouse grabbed the snake’s fangs and upper jaw with its little rodent hands, while standing on the lower jaw, and held the rattler’s mouth open, avoiding a certain poisonous death. Struggling and retracting, the snake, confused by the field mouse’s tactics, let’s the mouse go to strike again. But again, the mouse grabs the jaws and keeps the snake from biting. The pumper, at this point, has completely changed sides. He now believes the rodent has won its freedom and should be set free. The cowboss, however, thinks it might be a bad idea to let that type of hybrid vigor continue amongst the field mice — that might be the last thing this ranch needs.
I’d like to say this is where our hero got set free, but before there was opportunity for debate, one of the other inhabitants of the tank struck the mouse.
I am not so sure allowing those genetics to continue among the field mice would have been a good idea either.
This article was originally published in the April 2024 issue of Western Horseman.
