Here’s a snake story for y’all.

I was down in the Big South Fork, just before Turkey Season in 2000. My buddy that lived down there had taken me out scouting here and there, and then we assembled the whole tribe and went for a hike, heading downstream from Yamacraw. We’d gone only a couple of hundred yards before I realized I could not remember where I’d placed my wallet. I decided to run back to the truck and check. The rest of the party kept going slow. There was a place, just before the parking lot, where the weeds were tall. My buddy’s grandson was tailing me at about 10 yards. John was a teenager, but he’d been following his Grandpa for years and was very trail savvy.

I heard a crack and my right leg went out from underneath me. I went down in incredible pain. John, the grandson, came up behind me and started doing battle with something in the weeds. The fight went on for a bit and then whatever it was, John lost it. If the story had ended right there, John would have gone to his grave certain that he’d seen me bit by a rattlesnake.

It took a little while to get my pant leg up and see the damage. Nothing. We looked for fang marks. Nothing. John went back to the weeds to look. Nothing. He’d been right behind me. He heard the strike–I had too. It sounded like the crack of a baseball bat. He was sure he’d seen the snake too. However, he’d only been guessing when he went at the weeds with his walking stick. All I knew was that something had hit my right leg with enough force to knock me to the ground.

With no fang marks, nothing on my jeans, and nothing to make sense out of, we all just sat there and scratched our heads. Joe, my buddy, had grown up down there. He was an expert on such things. He could not figure it out. They loaded me up and KYHillChick drove us all back. I spent the rest of the trip with my leg propped up, extremely swollen and sore.

When we got back to town, I went to the doctor. Doc had it figured out immediately: a Baker’s Cyst. It was a cyst in my calf muscle that had exploded under the skin. That accounted for the loud noise. It took about 2 weeks for the fluid to dissipate and the swelling to go down. He said it’s a common problem among golfers. They think they got hit by a golf ball, but never find it.

Go figure.

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