By H.B. Rushing Jr.
The year was nineteen sixty nine mid March in the town of Baton Rouge Louisiana. A humble but proud man and his young wife had a son. Here I am the eldest of three children, nicknamed “Blackie” because of my dark complexion. As the years passed and I grew into the boy that was my father’s son, all the older people in family would say “he is his father’s son.”
I became a Cub Scout, played tee ball and dreamed of great things. The summer before I starting the sixth grade we moved to a small town called French Settlement near the Amite River in the Southern part of Livingston Parish. This is where the story begins; my Dad and I started building a small house for our family. We cleared the property by hand with cane knives and axes, drilled the water well with a hand auger. Dad would assign tasks for me before he would go to work and I worked as hard as I could for him. We set the blocks and beams, laid out the joist and decked the floor. One weekend all my Dad’s friends came by and we framed the house. When dad wasn’t at work, we slowly finished the outside, the wiring and plumbing and moved in. life was great, I didn’t know we were poor, Mom would clean and cook for us, my little brother and sister would play and bug me.
After I had finished Webelows my Dad and I went to Mr. Penny Switzer’s house on a Monday evening. He was the Scout Master of Troop 83 in Denham Spring, Louisiana. We met with him for about an hour discussing letting me join his Troop, because I was a year too young for the Boy Scouts. But my Dad convinced him I was up for the challenge. We met on Monday nights at seven, the meetings were incredible and they taught us lots of skills, like how to survive in the wilderness and all kinds of cool stuff.
I would go on great adventures in the woods and swamp around our house. Looking back you would have thought we lived in nineteen-hundred. We had a small wooden house nestled in woods that was divided by Pollie Bayou. There were a few camps around us but no one lived in them fulltime.
Once when I was out on safari down the bayou that bordered our front yard, I came across the dreaded giant man-eating swamp rabbit. I had tracked the beast for hours trying to find his lair. Then out of nowhere he leaped out from behind a cypress tree, on the attack. I ran for cover, and found a limb low enough to grab, swung myself up and when I was perched on it like a puma ready to pounce on a buck, I unslung my trusty Benjamin pump .177cal pellet rifle. I had pumped it fifteen times when I loaded it. I took careful aim; I only had one shot so I had to make it count. I squeezed the trigger holding a short breath. Seconds later the beast lay dead at the base of the tree that I was in; his long white fangs showing with just a drop of blood dripping from his right eye were the pellet had entered his brain at 900 feet per second.
Dad had taught me that you eat what you kill or you don’t kill it. So I started dragging the beast to my pirogue and set out for the long paddle home. Along the way I witnessed something very few people have ever seen. There on the bank of Pollie bayou was a sight that amazed even me, a “seasoned woodman”: on the lower part of the small levee were two snakes fighting. One was a four foot cottonmouth moccasin the other was a three and a half foot speckled King Snake. They flipped and turned, twisting together like the strands of a rope. Striking at each other, all of a sudden the King Snake got a good bite on the cottonmouth’s head and tied him in a knot squeezing the life out of the pit viper. I sat and watched for over an hour as the Great King swallowed his prey.
He turned and stared at me with his cold black eyes for what seemed like an eternity. In my mind I could hear him saying, I rule the snake kingdom. I have let you witness this act to teach you that poison and terror do not make you powerful, you must learn that size and strength are not what counts but cunning and determination will provide for you much better. This was the first time that I had communicated with a wild thing.
I was starting to learn that my education was going to be infinite, from books and school, from my Dad and now from nature herself. Why me, what great thing was I suppose to do with my life that the King of the Snakes would take the time to show me that good must always fight against evil?
I turned back to my labor of paddling home to prepare for the feast. When I reached the dock in front of our home I struggled to lift the great beast to the cleaning table my Dad had built, it was almost as tall as I was. I rolled a Red Oak log up to the table and climbed on top of it, took out my razor sharp Boy Scout pocketknife and went to task of skinning and cleaning the animal. When I was finished I walked across the front yard and into our house. When Mom and Dad saw me holding such a brute they were amazed at what I had accomplished.
Mom went to cooking and Dad and I started cleaning my Benjamin. We always cleaned our guns after they had been shot, while cleaning them we would check for anything that might have gotten lose or broke and fix it, this way they would never fail us. When you are hunting the kinds of creatures that I hunt you have to have the utmost trust in your weapons.
More to come.