I Should Not Have Done It

This afternoon we called the cows in at milking time.  It was a very hot day today, and of course Rosie was laying in the mud.  While Tricia gave her a bath outside the barn so we could milk her, I mixed up the feed in the feed room.  Something made me look in the corner behind the roll of barbed wire and on the side of the old freezer we use to store feed in.  Something was there that looked out of the ordinary.  Was it a rat?  It was too dark to see in the shadows.  I went and got a shovel.

My thought process went something like this.  What if it is a rat?  I hate rats in our barn and want to kill every last one of them.  What if it is a snake?  Even though they kill rats, they also eat eggs and most importantly, it could scare Tricia and that wouldn't be a good thing to have her afraid to come to the barn.  I quickly weighed the alternatives in my mind and made my decision.

One swift strike of the shovel resulted in a swift strike in return from a... chicken snake.  A big one.  It had a huge bulge in its stomach I assumed from eating some of our chicken eggs.  I picked up the injured snake and threw him out of the barn near where Tricia was finishing up washing Rosie.  She said, "That's a big snake.  I was wondering what was taking you so long in there!"  I told Tricia that the snake was fat and must have a few of our eggs in him.  Tricia didn't think it looked like eggs.  I cut the snake in half right above the bulge.  What is that thing?!

I stepped on the snake and something big and slimy oozed out.  Well, Tricia was right.  It was a big, fat rat!

I guess the snake had feasted on one of the rats in the barn and was settling down in the corner to digest its meal when I made the discovery.  How did the snake fit that big ol' rat in his stomach?  Better yet, how did it open it's mouth wide enough to eat it?

After my dissection of the snake was complete, Tricia told me that if the snake wouldn't bother her, she would have been fine with me leaving him alone so that he could wolf down more rats in the barn.  It was too late, though.  The chickens were already pulling the guts out of the snake.  Well, I'm sure there are more chicken snakes out there that will be attracted to the rats in the barn.  So maybe the next guy won't meet such an untimely end.