Originally Posted by
DougGuy
I lived on Sioux Bayou down on the Mississippi gulf coast in 1980, a friend's house on stilts, it was right in the marsh no kidding. We used to throw kitchen scraps over the back rail and I guess it attracted plenty of hungry marsh critters.
This white haired elderly black man used to come sit on the bank just around the bend with his can of worms and fish, one day he was leaving in a hurry, eyes wide open, he said "I'm near in my 80s and there's a cottonmouth down there biggest I ever seen!"
About a week after this incident, I was getting out of the shower, nothing but a pair of cutoffs on, and this girl that stayed there a while called me over the back rail to show me the snake.
There it was, all coiled up and sunning him/her self, and I could tell it was huge, it's coils easily as big as my forearm. I put on my boots, went down the stairs and under the house I grabbed a hoe and a machete post haste and came upon the snake straight forward, not wasting any time, I got to him before he was ready to strike, and I hit him behind the head with the hoe blade, then lifted him up with the hoe and chopped the head off with the machete. The head and about 6" of it's neck went down in the marsh grass and was biting at the grass, venom just squirting out of it's fangs. Was quite the sight to see!
Meanwhile the part I didn't tell was that while I was launching the frontal attack on the snake, I was rapidly sinking in the mud up above my knees, less than 3' from the snake. If I didn't get him, he'd a for sure got me.
I worked my way up out of my boots and laid on the mud and pulled them up, then took the snake and hung his head in the branches of a tree by his fangs, there were 2 fangs on each side, the frontal most one was the big one, easy 1 1/2" long, there was another lesser fang behind that on each side. I skinned him out and the hide, minus 6" of head and neck, wrapped halfway around an 8" creosote piling all the way from the fascia board to the ground, almost 8' so this snake was probably 8'3" or thereabouts. The hide was a FOOT wide when skinned.
Most cottonmouths I have ever seen, and I seen a LOT growing up down there on the coast, even the biggest ones are no more than 5' - 6' at the most, and nowhere near big as a man's forearm. That old black man was right about how big the snake he saw was, and he was right to get the hell outta dodge when he did.