2021/2022
Collection 17

A Venomous Surprise

c. 1900; Iowa or Missouri, USA

One dreary summer day my great-great-grandpa Hollings went fishing in a lake on his farm. It was swelteringly hot, so he waded into the water to cool off and cast his line. He waited and waited, but no fish nibbled at his lure. He had no idea what lurked under the water.

No sunlight shown on the water, but if some had, he would have seen the shape swimming toward him like a long ribbon in a gust of wind.

He was about to give up for the day and leave, but just then he felt a tug on the line. Excitedly, he reeled it in, expecting to see a fish, but what he saw was something altogether different. It was a snake! He dropped the fishing pole in surprise, but this enabled the snake to swim toward him through the water.

A searing pain shot up through his leg, and he knew he had been bitten. He hobbled away, but when he got to the shore, his leg buckled and he had to crawl the length of two football fields to his house. When he got to his house, my great-great-grandma Hollings came outside, and she found him on the ground, clutching his leg and in bad shape.

He told her the story and showed her the two puncture wounds in his lower calf that were leaking a yellowish-green pus.

My great-great-grandma knew a lot about snakes. She recognized that there was venom in his leg, so she put her mouth to the bite and sucked the venom out of the wound.

My great-great-grandpa had to lie in bed for a couple of days, and he recovered. My great-great-grandma had rotten teeth, and the venom she’d had in her mouth spread up into her head, and she got very sick shortly after. Thankfully, she got better. After the incident, my great-great-grandpa looked in a snake book and identified the culprit as a water moccasin, which is a very dangerous and deadly water snake.

After this startling discovery, my great-great-grandparents made sure to warn their friends and family to be cautious around the lake. They wanted to make sure nobody else would be bitten by a venomous snake on their property.

Dylan Powers; Missouri, USA

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