SCORPION TALES!

WOW!

You're welcome. He was a successful stock broker in NYC for 10 years, but hankered to lead the life of a big game hunter and professional guide. So in the 1960s he quit his job and went and did it.

His first book is called Death In The Long Grass. I won't give anything much away, but this little teaser: he studied elephants in zoos, their anatomy, where to shoot them, etc. in great detail but never laid eyes on one in the wild until it was charging at close range and his client had missed it twice with a double barreled rifle!

I will have to get a couple of Capstick's books to peruse, they sound very exciting!
I've never heard of this person before. He must have led a very exciting and interesting life as a big game hunter! Thanks Pat...Bernadette

OMG! Those are incredible stories, especially the leopard under the bed!
You sure lucked out with your experience of sitting on the snake and not being bitten!

Speaking of snakes, I sat on a pygmy rattler in 1968 when I was going through the U.S. Army's Ranger School. We were in a huge swamp on Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle. Snake died, I was unbitten. ☺

Also, in one of Peter Hathaway Capstick's exciting Africa books about his own and others' adventures he tells of seeing a living room sofa in the house of some friends, with what looked like a shotgun blast in the decorative wood which ran along the top. Sure enough, his friend said he looked in and saw his wife sitting on the sofa and a deadly snake crawling along the top right toward her. He grabbed a shotgun and fired, scaring his wife half to death and killing the snake. They LIKED the damage and left it unrepaired as sort of a souvenir.

Another time Capstick was told by a friend that he had looked in on his little girl sleeping one evening. Just as he was closing the door he saw a flicker of movement under the bed. It was the unmistakeable tail of a leopard UNDER HER BED! Again a 12 gauge was employed to solve the problem. As quietly as he could he laid it on the floor in the doorway and pointed it and pulled the trigger.

Really amazing memory you have Pat, I guess something like that would be hard to forget...Bernadette

5 to 6 feet, and it had a mature full-bodied look to it. There was a group of about 20 or 30 people standing around in a circle facing each other. I was about to give them a class about a variety of types of guns. We were just inside the chain link fence and I happened to see it first, approaching across the sand and right through the fence toward us. I looked at the person whose feet it was going to pass and said firmly, "DON'T MOVE." The snake came right past his feet and out into the empty middle of the circle and then sensed that something was wrong. So it stopped and coiled up.

We all stood there in silence for a few seconds and then somebody said to me, "Shoot it!" I said, "No, I'm not going to shoot it in the middle of all these people." Then I pointed to the person closest to the Range House, and furthest from the rattler, and told him to go tell the Rangemasters what was going on. A Rangemaster quickly appeared carrying a long piece of metal pipe with a steel cable attached which made a loop and then went up the pipe to the end in his hand. He pushed out more cable to make a loop large enough so when he slowly lowered it the snake didn't notice it. Then he smoothly pulled his end and the wire loop shrank until it was too late for Mr. Rattler!

He held it up for us all to admire and then walked over to the concrete slab on which the Range house was built. He put the snake's head on the edge of the concrete and stepped down on it with his boot. We all heard the crunch-crack-crunch and the whole crowd said, "Eeeeewwww!" Then we went ahead and had our demonstration shoot, during which I never missed a shot! (I had a reputation as the best shot in the firearms industry.)

WOW, that must have been exciting. How big was this sidewinder Pat?

I had a close encounter with a sidewinder rattler at the Black Canyon shooting range in Phoenix one day. The Rangemasters were ready though, and reacted promptly. They had a homemade snake noose which worked perfectly. The guy who snared the snake held it up, twisting and rattling and said, "This'll make a real nice hatband."

Yes, for scorpions and rattle snakes..although the snakes are mostly in caves and burrows now due to the colder temperatures this time of year. It was 39° this morning, which is cold for this area.

You probably have to be careful outside as well?

I know, right! We have to hang our shoes up, here in Arizona, to keep scorpions out of them, so this was an interesting find of one of Larson's comics for me. Thanks for your comment K...Bernadette

"What made you go into such a smelly cave in the first place?"