Bit by a Copperhead

I said in last week’s column that I would write about the fourth venomous snake in the Ozarks and I will. That snake is the hog-nosed snake, or spreading adder, as it is also known. Yes, it has fangs and venom, but cannot bite humans. Read about it next week!

The following column is an excerpt from the book “Ridge-Runner, From the Big Piney to the Battle of the Bulge” which is the story of my Uncle Norten Dablemont’s life. It took place in when he was 10 years old.

Three months after the snakebite.. my sister Zodie and I. By then I could outrun her again.

Mom and Pop were upriver setting trotlines in the summer of 1933. Mom was only a month or so away from giving birth to my youngest brother, Bryce. She and Pop took little brother Farrel along to help get bait. Zodie and I had been left behind to do something but I can’t remember what it was. We got into some kind of argument and I had ran out of the house and was jumping up and down on a board, teasing her, reminding her that she could only wish she could get her hands on me.

Beneath that board was a big copperhead and he took Zodie’s side of the argument! He came out from beneath it, half mashed and all mad. He nailed me just above the middle toe of my left foot. I felt a hot, burning pain, and when I looked down, the snake was stuck on my foot, writhing around trying to get his fangs out so he could take aim again. I kicked him away and killed him with a garden tool of some kind.

As I remember it, that copperhead was a monster of a snake. He was about 30 inches long and as big around as a golfball, and that’s a pretty good size for a copperhead in the Big Piney hills.

Zodie saw it happen and she ran to get Pop. I didn’t know much about what to do so I tightened an old rag around my leg just above the ankle and made a tourniquet. It took Pop awhile to get back and you could tell he was scared, especially after seeing the size of that snake.

I was getting sick by the time Pop got home and my foot was swelling and throbbing. Pop took his razor and told me to look away and yell real loud. I did, but it still hurt when he incised the fang marks and began to suck out the poison just like the old-timers had always said you should do. When he finished that, he poured coal oil in a pan and soaked my foot in the coal oil.

I asked Pop if I was going to die. He said that he had known lots of people who had been bitten two or three times and lived through it. But he was saying that for my benefit, because back then everyone knew of people who had died from a copperhead bite. Of course, none of them were as tough as me!

By nightfall my ankle was the same size as my lower leg, and my foot was swelled up something awful, beginning to turn bluish-black. I began to run a fever and become delirious. Mom held me all night and I had horrible, fitful dreams. I had never seen concrete that I know of, but I dreamed that night that I was laying on a big slab of concrete in a sweltering sun, suffocating in the heat. That went on for days, my fever soaring!

It was that high fever and blood poisoning that killed snakebite victims back then. When I did come around enough to drink some water, I was in gosh awful pain and hallucinating with the fever. By the second day my whole lower leg and foot were bluish-black and the skin on my foot and ankle was beginning to split open. Mom was keeping it coated with grease, and possum fat.

For about three days I was delirious…mostly unconscious and very sick. But for those of you who are biting your fingernails in suspense, I didn’t die! It must have been hell for Mom with me needing so much attention just as the new baby was on the way. But Mom was devoted to the Lord, the finest woman I ever knew… and she knew how to pray. I think that is what worked better than anything else and the reason I lived.

A large area of my foot around the bite rotted with infection. It smelled terrible! I couldn’t walk at all and my little brother Farrel had to pull me around in a cart we had for hauling wood.

I overdid it a little and had Farrel haul me around in that cart quite awhile after I became able to walk. If Pop hadn’t eventually put an end to it, Farrel would have been pulling that cart ‘til Christmas.

The snakebite had no lasting effect and I was fortunate. Many people who have had a leg swell and turn black and break open like that have lost it to amputation. In that day, folks who were not strong would often die, and one fellow died from the amputation of his hand. I was bitten by a copperhead again ten or twelve years later and it didn’t even effect me. And since then, bee stings and wasp stings have had no effect at all and I pay little attention to the occasional stinging remarks of my wife, or the venomous insults of my adversaries.

The book “Ridge-Runner” is one of my best sellers, and can be seen on the website, wwwlarrydablemont.com We are down to our last 100 or so of them and printing a new batch my have to wait awhile because of the paper shortages we now have. Norten passed away several years ago, but you can still get one of last 50 or so books he autographed by calling our office at 417-777 5227. I have been told by many it is the best book they have ever read, one they could not put down after they began to read it.