[sigh]... Water snake.
Ha ha - I troll. You might be the only person on this forum I'd believe without a photo.
While I fully endorse the no-venomous-snakes-without-tools rule, I have a long story on the subject. When I was a Boy Scout, we went to a summer camp in the Blue Ridge every other summer. One year, I signed up for a wilderness survival camp-out, led by this college kid named Ken. All the Scouts thought Ken was hardcore because he was a big guy and wore overalls with no shirt or, we assumed, underwear.
We hiked to the wilderness area, and were told to go into the woods to gather materials to build a shelter. I noticed a pile of rough-cut boards in the middle of the clearing. I was like, 'sweet, this shelter is going to rock'. I lifted up a board and saw right away the pattern of a copperhead nestled in the boards. I yelled, "Copperhead", and the adults - including my dad/Scoutmaster - came running.
They made sure the kids were thirty yards away or so, and called for the camp's snake guy. He drove in 15 minutes later - so much for 'wilderness' - and the adults started very carefully lifting boards so the snake guy could get a lasso pole around the snake's neck. He lifted it out of the boards, and this thing was big.
It was so big that the snake guy couldn't control it with the lasso pole. It started wiggling loose. My dad, who used to be the snake guy at a tourist-trap zoo in south Florida, stepped up and grabbed the snake with his hands, just as it got loose from the lasso. I could hear the other adults gasp when he picked it up. Dad - who is not prone to hyperbole - says the thing was maybe 36" long, which is about as big as they get.
Unbeknownst to my dad, Ken the survival guy had walked around behind my dad, about six feet away. When my dad started to lose control of the copperhead, he turned around and threw it behind him - right at Ken.
This dude jumped from standing still as far as I have seen a human being jump, outside of the Olympics - and he did it backwards. And once he landed, he was gone - just disappeared from the scene. Ken, it turns out, was terrified of snakes.
The other adults were by this point completely tired of Ken's no-shirt tough-guy BS, so for the rest of the week we had grownups coming up to my dad and saying things like, "By God - if this place sold beer, I'd buy you one". They'd clap him on the back and laugh their asses off about dad throwing that snake at Ken.
They thought he did it on purpose. Dad swears he had no idea Ken was back there.
http://www.tpfr.org
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