What the heck is THAT?

Living in Pinewood out in Hardin County means coexisting with snakes of all sizes and varieties.

Pinewood has every kind of venomous snake in North America, meaning water moccasins, copperheads, rattlesnakes and even the nasty coral snake.

Last summer, I often saw as many as three venomous snakes on a single five-mile run. One morning when it was barely light enough to see, I spotted a telltale dark shape on the road and barely had time to hurdle it. I stopped to give it a closer look, and sure enough, it was a fat cottonmouth slithering across the road. The snake was so confident of his abilities to take care of himself that he didn't even bother to coil when I approached. He just kind of turned his and looked at me as if to say, "YOU WANT SOME OF THIS?"

I didn't, so I trotted on. I've been wearing a headlamp on morning runs ever since.

This spring, I got my boys, ages 3 and 5, a big picture book about snakes, and I've made it a point to drill into them that every snake will bite, so run away from snakes.

Yesterday, the wife called to report that our new puppy, Jack, a sort of cur dog-border collie-beagle mix, had delivered a present to a back door step, but she wasn't quite sure what it was. She said it was slinky and snake-looking.

"Does it have legs?" I asked.

"Yeah, it does," she said.

"Then it's a skink. They're harmless," I said.

However, when I got home from work and went to the back yard to check it out, I discovered that, yes, it was a skink, but not entirely.

Jack had accosted a king snake that had eaten a skink. By some freak sequence of chewing, the snake's tail had been chewed off, and half a skink was hanging out of the hole.

I've seen some of those bizarre pictures of snakes that have eaten, or tried to eat, creatures such as crocodiles, humans and whatnot, but I've never seen anything like this.

Unfortunately, two of the good guys, one that eats bugs and one that eats dangerous snakes, fell victim to Jack's emerging snake-hunting prowess.

I can only imagine how interesting the summer months will get, as more snakes come out and Jack continues to get bigger.