Since my grandfather passed away when I was only two or three years old, this story was passed down by my grandmother to us grandchildren. I have no reason to doubt the story's truth and so I pass it along as best I remember it.

My grandfather, Papa Joe, was a foremen in the lead mines in southwestern Missouri. He farmed about twenty acres to raise food for himself, his wife and their three children. It was late Fall or early Winter, late in the day as he was coming back up to the house with his axe over his shoulder and a kerosene lantern swinging from his other hand. He heard the buzz of a rattlesnake and froze in his tracks. Lifting the lantern, he saw the snake coiling on the path just ahead of where he stood. Since he wasn't in any immediate danger, and knew the snake's reflexes were slowed by the cold, he decided to deal with the threat once and for all.

He used the axe to tease the snake into striking, then planted his boot on its head and severed the neck with one swift blow of the axe. The body writhed for a couple of minutes, finally relaxing and lying stretched out almost straight across the path. Satisfied that the snake was no longer a threat to anyone or any of the animals, Papa Joe continued up to the house and washed up for dinner.

Over dinner he told the family about killing the snake, stressing that he would have had to be much more careful if it had been Summer since the cold slowed the snake quite a bit. His children were adamant that he needed to go back and cut off the rattles for them to play with. After a short time of them begging and pleading, Papa Joe put on his coat, picked up the axe and lantern and went back to retrieve the rattles, just to mollify the children. He came to the snake stretched across the path, lopped off the rattles and went back into the house. The children were thrilled by the new toy and played with the rattles for a while before bedtime.

The next morning after breakfast, Papa Joe put on his coat, took the axe and lantern and headed back to where he had been cutting saplings and shrubs to make a pen for the piglets to be born in the Spring. Imagine his amazement when he got to the dead snake stretched across the path and discovered it still had the rattles attached.