ESPN Hunting

Editor's note: This is the second installment of a four-part story about the March 9-11 Rattlesnake Round-Up in Sweetwater, Texas.

Part I | Part III | Part IV | Photo galleries

SWEETWATER, Texas — If you're like most people, you're probably wondering how your family's rattlesnake filets go from desert rock formations to your icebox. Glad you asked! Turns out there's a fascinating and revolting story behind that.

It begins on the first morning of Sweetwater's Rattlesnake Round-Up, the world's largest, when hunters Dennie Braswell and Steve Rives pull up with a trailer of flat, heavy crates packed with western diamondbacks.

Unbeknownst to the crew, the fourth box has a hole in one corner. It becomes knownst when a Jaycee member named Tyal Rule grabs it, and a snake head shoots out of the rotten wood to strike his gloved hand.

"Whoa!" screams Jack Allen, who is also helping to unload snakes. "That box is no good!" As Rule steps back to inspect his paw, Allen reaches a leg up to the trailer and boot-stomps several inches of wafting snake back into the box.

"That's the way to start Friday morning at the Round-Up!" he says.

"I didn't know that box had a hole in it," Braswell explains to Rule.

"That snake did," Rule replies, happy not to have been punctured. "He tried to get into my glove."

Whoa! You can see why people in this west Texas village of 11,000 get so geeked about their Round-Up: The excitement! The drama! The opportunity to mass-murder dang rattlesnakes! But it's not that simple. First, the snakes have to be weighed (the Jaycees buy them by the pound, then sell them to wholesalers).

The snakes are then dumped unceremoniously into a pit that resembles a small, octagonal swimming pool with chest-high walls. There a man named Chris Soles stands in boots and chaps, picking the odd dead snake out of the piles with tongs and pushing the live ones around like onry shuffleboard pucks.

The chorus of rattles sounds like a roomful of chattering wind-up teeth, an electric razor convention, a heaping basketful of frozen fries splashing the grease bath at BK. A woman stops to stare at the growing litter of snakeflesh and says, "I could have nightmares tonight."

Soles' cell phone rings. "Yeah," he answers. "Yeah. In the pit. They won't let you in?" It's creepy here, but hardly a life-threatening situation.

A Canadian-born Reuters reporter named Ed Stoddard stands at the edge of the pit as workers disgorge crate after crate of rattlesnakes in with Chris.

"So the rattle goes off when they're a bit distressed?" he asks.

The cowboy confirms that yes, this is the case. In fact, unless you're moving, they hardly flinch. The pit contains so many snakes that the handlers bring 20-ounce cans of Right Guard to combat the smell — but if you walk right up to them, and stand still, they writhe in silence.

When the Jaycees finish unloading Braswell and Rives' snakes, their total is worthy of the dry heaves: 1,658 pounds of live snakes. But Braswell had calculated the haul at more like 1,678 pounds. "We lost 20 pounds of snakes?" he asks. "Those dead ones weighed only a pound apiece." That leaves about 10 snakes unaccounted for.

"Maybe," he guesses, "they crawled out of that hole."

Milking honey

From their ghoulish playpen the snakes go to the milking pit, where a couple of men with snake hooks pull them one after another from a plastic trash barrel.

A snake hook is just a golf iron with a rectangular prong in place of a club face — crude, but technology enough to lift a snake, place him on a table, and squash his head flat while a handler gets fingers around its jaws.

Then he hangs the snake's fangs over a glass funnel and pinches its cheeks until an amber glaze runs out of the needles in its skull.

That venom, if it gets under your skin, will make you sicker than an exorcism patient. A dog or a cow will likely survive a snake bite, unless that bite arrives on the creature's nose and swells its breathing passages closed, which, if you've ever seen how a dog or cow explores the world, explains why ranchers (and just about anyone with kids or a yard) got the idea to gather and slaughter the reptiles.

Snakes aren't thrilled with the prospect of giving up the venom when they bite — it takes two weeks to restore, a huge investment by a snake — so only about two-thirds of bites even contain venom, and many of those, only a smidge. It may be nasty stuff, but researchers have processed the 70-odd compounds in the venom to develop treatments for blood clots and tumors.

These are the sort of rattlesnake fun facts that a wrangler named David Soger tries to emphasize during his educational demonstration, called "Learning to Live With Rattlesnakes."

Living with them instead of, say, getting bitten while tending to your rose bushes and then hacking up every snake in sight with a garden hoe.

To prompt the snakes to strike a balloon in his hand, he places them on a table and whacks them on the head, over and over, with hook and with balloon. "What I'm doing," he tells the crowd, "is something you're not supposed to do."

The snakes all try first to escape, to withdraw their heads, to hide. Those that refuse to strike, he discards to the floor. When he persists with others, the snakes lunge with such speed that by the time the balloon pops and the crowd yelps and anyone's mouth has secreted that first iron-flavored spritz of fear near their tonsils, the rattler has recoiled and re-coiled.

Diversions

If you need a breather from snakes, the Round-Up also features the following: Marines recruiters, free spit-tobacco samples, frozen lemonade, a flea market, a knife and gun show, a county-fair style midway, turkey legs, sausage-on-a-stick vendors, lacquered armadillos drinking beers, longhorn horns, pony rides, wooden crosses, sassy T-shirts, "Jesus is God Read the Bible" caps, kettle corn, funnel cakes, curly fries, free face painting with Bible stories for kids, rattlesnake belt buckles, rattlesnake purses, rattlesnake paperweights, rattlesnake head key chains, rattlesnake rattle necklaces, rattlesnake billfolds, rattlesnake money clips, rattlesnake wallets, rattlesnake hat bands, rattlesnake fang earrings and, yes, fake-out envelopes of rattlesnake eggs, which are the oldest gag in the book but should be received with good humor, because many nice folks greet strangers by hazing them mildly.

At the flea market, two men are overheard:

"I wouldn't vote for a Democrat if he were the only one on the ticket."

"I'm getting that way myself."

"And I vote for the best man! But I just don't see any Democrats worth a damn."

"Not since Truman."

Suggested slogan for the Dems in '08: "Vote for the party that dropped The Bomb."

How to be a cowboy

By mid-day, the Jaycees have set up one final booth. On the dirt floor of the convention center they've spread sheetrock floors and brought in a stainless steel countertop with a sink at one end and holes that empty into drums below. Above is a PVC bar with strings hanging, like a snake gallows.

A small crowd gathers. With tongs a Jaycee named Lewis Torres plucks a snake out of a plastic barrel, places its head on a worn mesquite log and holds it long enough for another Jaycee, Cecil Villa, to drive a machete clean through. The head goes twitching into a bucket, while the body is strung up tail-first from the little nooses.

For $20 anyone who wants to can put on a spatter-proof suit, finish butchering a snake and keep the skin as a trophy. One of the first takers is Morrison Ni, the energetic, goateed host of a travel show on Taiwanese cable called "World's Number One."

As his crew films, Ni takes instructions beautifully, gripping the severed end of the snake and dragging a knife up the pus-colored belly, creating a sound like a scissors through cloth. A few feet away, the boom-mike operator covers his mouth. Blood drips dark. "I'm the man!" Ni hams. "I'm a cowboy!"

With the skin unzipped, Ni turns out the snake's sheath of a body, revealing a cascade of innards. Down into the barrel goes the ragged string of organs, off comes the rest of the skin. It's dropped into a wet bucketful of hides, leaving just the muscle, a denuded, yard-long worm that still twitches and flops as he casts it into a final barrel of meat.

Ni's instructor for this ritual then tells him it's customary to leave a handprint on the wall, and sign it. The cable show host kneels to one of the small puddles of blood on the sheetrock underfoot and daubs his palm. He turns to the wall, another temporary panel of sheetrock, and high-fives it. As the handprint drips, he signs the wall.

Somewhere in east Asia, a mother is pointing at a TV and telling her children that Americans are thoroughly mad, while the tots nod and silently vow to one day visit this "Texas."

After his snake-cleaning, with the cameras off, Ni says, a little apologetically, "I have to do it. I'm a host. It's my job." His biggest complaint: The snake smell, still on his hands after two scrubbings.

A taste of the wild

Gourmands stir-fry rattlesnake or grace quesadillas with it, and swear by it, but for just a sample, the concourse snack bar sells segments of freshly killed, beer-battered, fried rattlesnake for $2 apiece. People say it tastes like chicken, but only because it takes too long to say that it tastes like gamey fried chicken left to sun on a hot engine block, filled with greasy spine and thatched together with a nest of fine bones. If offered a piece of real chicken for your rattlesnake sandwich, you should trade, straight-up.

When Braswell, the hunter, is told of this meal the next day, he asks in amazement: "You actually ate some of it?" At that moment he happens to be standing on a rocky mountaintop tending to a box of live snakes he has just smoked out of caves. There is bravery, it seems, and then plain lunacy.
Part I | Part III | Part IV | Photo galleries