When Life & Death Held Hands by B. Vere Wilson 10/31/67

This was written as an English Assignment for a college class by Dad (Benjamin Vere Wilson) dated October 31, 1967

When Life and Death Held Hands

Danger became an exciting, yet a very frightening experience one beautiful morning in the early part of June 1928. Three boy scouts packed their gear and headed out on their long awaited fourteen mile hike, which had be postponed several times for one reason or another, but this time it was different. This day I shall never forget. I was one of those boy scouts.

We left early on this particular morning, excited and anxious to get back home before dark.

We stopped about nine o’clock for chow, bacon and eggs as I remember, was the menu, and after cleaning up the vittles and resting a while, we crawled back into our packs and began winding our way through the trail through cottonwood, riverbed sand, and rocks. After a while, going became rough, so we decided to go out of the riverbed and hike along the rime of the canyon. About a mile after we left the river bed things began to happen. I heard a strange locust-like sound just in front of me, yet it was different enough that I knew it wasn’t a locust, and the next thought that came into my mind was “a rattler”! Just at that moment a long gray body thrust _______from a spring-like ball full length, barely missing my shoulder. I yelled at my companions to stop and they must have sensed the situation, but things were more complicated than that. The rattling, buzzing, was everywhere in the rocks above us, in the bushes, on the ground, many of them all around us. Those gray and brown spring-like coils thrusting their beady eyed heads at us hoping to sink their deadly fangs into my flesh.

I ran forward as this seemed best, still they seemed to be everywhere, but upon slipping through a very narrow pass found myself free, but the others had not come. Where were they? I yelled at them, I wanted to run back, but I wasn’t sure yet that one of the reptiles hadn’t found me with its deadly aim. I was too frightened to know but while franticly trying to make this decision, my companions came around from behind a small cliff-like precipice, one of them holding his arm and crying out: “One of them got me, I’ve been bitten.” I forgot all about myself and ran to him for he was my brother. I told our other traveling companion to run for help and we proceeded to follow the instructions we had learned on snakebite. I took my pocketknife from my pocket, made him lie down in the shade of a chaparral and quickly made a series of long cuts immediately over the jagged tooth marks of the reptile. I sucked rapidly at the wound, hoping to get enough of the poison extracted to keep him from dying, for I thought it was certain or almost certain death to be bitten.

After the excitement began to war off, I seemed to have an awareness that there was very little swelling, but still I worked and prayed, and in a couple of hours help had come. My companion had run over three miles to the nearest help. It was amazing how he held up. We found later that the fangs of the snake have gone on through and the venom had mostly been deposited on the outside. How thankful! How thankful! How terribly grateful I was to be alive!