by Jan Fielden
We had a very interesting Saturday this past week. Sweet Pea, the calf we have in the corral that we are bottle feeding is growing a little each day, it seems. I asked The Colonel if he wanted to go down with me to feed her and so he could check on her to see how she was doing. Down we go, I went in the corral and The Colonel stayed in the gateway. The area we have her in borders the side of the barn and part of the trough. He put up a bull panel to close the area off. She is still small; she was born premature, so she has a lot of catching up to do. She is growing but is not quite as big as she would be if she had been carried to term.
Sweet Pea comes to the bull panel to be fed and I stand on the outside to feed her. She was nursing the bottle very good and had just a little bit left to go when I turned to say something to The Colonel. That was when I noticed the Copperhead snake that had somehow gotten to the wall of the barn which has bull panels covering it and this was where the snake was. I said, Colonel, there is a big Copperhead snake on the wall. He came in, looked and told me to go in to the barn, open the door and get Sweet Pea to come over there before the snake got to her area, he said I am going to get my gun. I realized the snake would have to come down about four levels to get on the ground. My worry was that the snake would somehow get down to the ground and I wouldn’t be able to locate it when The Colonel got back.
The snake didn’t move that way anymore, The Colonel got there with the gun, shot the snake so that it was dead, dead, dead. We measured it, five feet one inch. I am now carrying my gun all over the Red Oak Ranch.
