Once, long ago I had a southern pine, and I enjoyed him...but my love for pits didn't start until I was in college.



I was working at an office supply store in Amarillo, Texas. On the back, there's a very large field--I guess some rancher owns it--and we occasionally got wildlife in the parking lot (I used to see fox often if I worked a real early shift).

It was one of the early cold days of the year; probably in October, but I'm not certain. It was slow. I was at the camera display playing with the products (product training we called it), and this angry lady storms over to me demanding a manager, how could we pull a prank like this...I page the MOD over on our little radios we wore. She orders him to "look at this", and the poor guy does and I trail along, mostly to see what's up cause it was just him and me...and I knew neither of us did anything weird.



Marches us over to the chair section; there's a little baby bull snake, like maybe a foot long, coiled up on an office chair. I don't know if she'd mistaken it for a fake, or thought someone had actually put a live snake there on purpose. The MOD was afraid of most animals--he was even afraid of salamanders for god's sake. He runs screaming to the cash office and locks himself in and speaking over the radio tells me to take care of it and that he ain't coming out till the snake's contained. At this point the lady's looking at me like we're all crazy and I can't really blame her. I sort of wanted to rag on the MOD but refrained because he had NO sense of humor.



I gently tell her it's harmless and probably wandered in from the cold and I'll remove it...by which I meant grab a pillowcase from my trunk and leave the snake in the break room till I went home with it



He was both hungry and cranky so I named him after my brother. He hit about 6' inside of a 2 year span, despite not eating much from Oct-Dec. but I wound having to get rid of him 3 years ago, along with most of my other animals, due to some successive hospital stays.



I didn't manage to keep any of my pits (another locally caught bull snake, and an SD gopher) during my involuntary downsizing--and I don't really plan to again, but I spend time every year looking for 'em in the field, cause there's nothing more interesting than a huge wild pit :D

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• How I got into pits! - varanid, Mon Oct 12 23:22:19 2009