Shake, Rattle And Head For The Hills

There I was, teetering on a slippery slope, staring into the poisonous fangs of death.

Rattlesnakes. Everywhere.

Yegads! The loose basalt rocks in front of me were crawling with blunt-headed, dark-striped snakes. One venomous bite could land me in a hospital. Or give me the nickname “Stubby.”

The hills were alive with the sound of rattling. No wonder my neck hairs were doing a snake dance of their own.

A few feet ahead was a sight far weirder than the damnable snakes:

Two grown men, gleefully pulling the writhing critters off the rocks the way happy fishermen haul lunkers out of a hot trout hole.

There’s one vital difference between catching fish and catching rattlesnakes. People who troll for rattlers pray there won’t be any biting.

“This is more fun than golf and waaay better for your heart,” says Roger Jensen, a 58-year-old wheat farmer whose dad taught him how to hunt rattlers when he was 21.

Every year about this time, Jensen and his pal, Don Ashenbrenner, carry on this bizarre tradition.

Ashenbrenner, 41, a sergeant with the Coeur d’Alene Police Department, supposedly turns the snake skins into hat bands and belt buckles for his friends.

That’s their cover story. I suspect, however, that these characters do this more for the adrenaline rush than for arts and crafts.

On Monday, they let me take a serpent safari so long as I swore an oath not to reveal the whereabouts of any of their treasured rattlesnake hunting grounds.

“A lot of people would love to know where these dens are,” Jensen told me. Oh, yeah. I’ll bet the line would stretch longer than tone-deaf hayseeds at a Garth Brooks ticket window.

To most sane people, the notion of getting up close and personal with rattlesnakes is scarier than walking into a biker bar and yelling “Harleys suck!”

“You guys are sick, sick, sick,” says Jensen’s wife, Bonnie, who refuses to accompany her hubby on his snake hunts.

“But I thought you wanted us to do more things together,” says a snickering Roger.

Bonnie is also mayor of this small town 65 miles west of Spokane, so she probably has her own creepy crawlies to contend with down at City Hall.

Neither Jensen nor Ashenbrenner has ever been bit, which strikes me as somewhat amazing.

They don’t wear gloves. They catch the critters with 3-foot tongs. The flaw in the ointment is that some rattlers are longer than the tongs.

A couple of years ago, Jensen’s heart got a marathon workout. He grabbed onto a tail. The irate snake turned and shimmied up the tongs, stopping about three inches shy of Jensen’s bare hands.

“You know you’ve got a big snake when that happens,” he says.

Some of the snake dens - places where rattlesnakes congregate like Teamsters to keep warm during the winter - are located precariously on the sides of mountains.

Translation: If the snakes don’t kill you, the fall just might.

Last year, Jensen took a tumble down a rocky slope. He couldn’t stop rolling until he hit bottom. Fortunately, he walked away with only bruises to his body and pride.

The snakes aren’t so lucky. Once nabbed, Jensen and Ashenbrenner use their tongs to quickly pinch the heads off.

It’s a grisly sight: gap-jawed rattlesnake heads littering the ground, their decapitated bodies still undulating despite death.

At the rocky den we climbed to, Jensen and Ashenbrenner killed and bagged a dozen snakes. Probably 40 more slipped away.

Reptile rights supporters won’t like this, but hunting rattlesnakes is perfectly legal.

According to a Washington Fish and Wildlife spokesman, the snakes aren’t classified or protected. So it’s always open season.

That suits the rattlesnake hunters just fine.

“I don’t like those people,” says Ashenbrenner of the animal rights crowd. “I hunt and fish and hunt snakes and eat steaks. I’m an outdoorsman.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo