By George!

Sure! Now with all the rattlesnakes snuggled in their underground dens for the winter, I find a couple of stories about 'em.

Actually, rattlers don't snuggle so much as they slither into a great big ball. Some dens may hold only a couple dozen while others may have hundreds. It was one of those really big dens that my father blasted during the winter of 1934-35 on Marco Hill. He was working in a crew rebuilding the road between Camas Prairie and Hot Springs.

Without going into details, I can tell you those few sticks of dynamite pretty well eliminated the rattlesnakes for a couple miles around; however the largest rattler I've ever seen was crossing the road on the north side of Marco Hill about six years later.

Back to those stories I found while "cleaning" my room on Saturday. There is no way for me to remember if I wrote about this when it happened in the fall of 1999. This is the AP story verbatim:

"(Helena-AP) A Helena contactor has died after being bitten by a rattlesnake and refusing medical treatment.

Wendell Deadmond Senior was bitten six weeks ago while fishing the Missouri River below Holter Dam. He died Saturday at the age of 61. A family member said he had strong religious convictions and wanted God to perform a miracle on him. For the last 20 years, Deadmond worked as a contractor in Helena. He is survived by his wife, Jeanine. Four grown sons in Helena and a daughter in Greybull, Wyoming. Services will be at Fortress of Joy, a church he helped build."

For whatever it's worth, my opinion is there's more to this than is revealed in the AP story. Fatalities from the kind of rattlers we have in this part of the west are rare . . . especially six week after the fact.

There have been several columns here over the years about rattlesnakes, mainly because there were so many of them in that part of my life spent at Camas Prairie. The last big adventure with those creatures was about five years ago when I went to toss one down to the road from a rock outcropping and pulled his rattles off. Was doing that so Son Shannon could take some pictures of a snake without getting out of the car. As it turned out he got a pretty good video of the entire proceedings, including the sound of swearing by someone.

Had intended to explore the closest rattler area this summer but somehow didn't get that done. Remember, I know of no rattlesnakes ever being seen more than a couple miles north of Dayton, and haven't seen or heard of any there for several years. The bigger populations are more toward The Big Draw . . . and of course further south along the Jocko River country.

The other rattler story I found Saturday is dated June 16, 2004.

This is it:

"(Idaho Falls- AP) An Idaho Falls man has been charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon for allegedly throwing a rattlesnake into a crowded bar. Twenty-eight year old Roger Hunter was charged yesterday. Police claim he walked into Chic's Lounge on Monday, pulled a three and a half foot rattler from his pocket and threw it into the crowd.

Bar patrons used a crutch to sweep the angry snake to a cleared area, then wrapped a T-shirt around its head before picking it up and dropping it in a bucket. No one was injured by the snake.

If convicted, Hunter could face up to five years in prison."

The absolute weirdest story last week was from White Plains, New York, where Brian Calen was charged with insurance fraud and grand larceny. Calen had claimed he was blinded by a cruise ship accident and was seeking high damages. Turns out he had "been blinded" three times before on cruise ships and had collected over a million dollars. The first time he was blinded by "a telescope," then "a cork from a champagne bottle," followed by "a flying disc."

Calen was very lucky in these accidents. He always got blinded in the same eye.

G. George Ostrom is the news director for KOFI Radio and a Flathead Publishing Group columnist.