STAR-TELEGRAM (Fort Worth, Texas) 14 February 05 In late winter, 88-year-old Edna McDonald dons a camouflage jacket.. (Asher Price)
Evant, Texas (A): In late winter, 88-year-old Edna McDonald dons a camouflage jacket over her teddy-bear embroidered shirt, grabs her purse and her rattlesnake tongs and heads out on the hunt.
January and February are snake-hunting season for Edna. It's been that way since she started handling the creatures as a babe like some Hill Country Hercules.
One recent Tuesday afternoon, enveloped in a low, cool fog, she leaned on the side of a steep hill, littered with limestone and armadillo holes, and peered into a cleft in a rock with the help of a flashlight.
She had gathered her usual entourage, all packed into a couple of pickups: J.J. Kuzenka, her property caretaker and trusted deputy; DW McDonald, her easily frightened 80-year-old husband from whom a nod is as good as a yes; and Floyd and Frances Parr, who spotted the rattlesnakes on the land they lease to run their cattle.
"When you hear she hunts rattlesnakes you'd think she's got teeth missing or a dirty braid down her back," said Frances Parr, 76.
But Edna McDonald, who has at least three mirrors in her plush red bathroom, gently adjusts her full head of glossy black curls now and then and sips ice water out of a Styrofoam cup. And chats. (She won, she says repeatedly, a public speaking prize in 1970.)
DW - those aren't initials; the youngest of 13 children, he was charged with naming himself - grins about how she wanted to prowl for rattlesnakes on a date: "She was so refined, it surprised me."
At Edna's home, a red brick house off U.S. 84, there's the taxidermied baby snake poised to strike atop her kitchen VCR and a rubber snake peeps out of the trellis. In the living room, a putrid odor seeps from a white bucket beside the sofa. Inside curls a sick snake she's been nursing. The reptile, it later turned out, was dead.
In her barn, in large wooden boxes covered with insulation and matted with hay, she puts her 40 or so snakes to bed. (She raises white mice to feed the snakes.)
She has outlasted much of Evant, a town so small (pop. 393) and left behind that the old school gym, still in use, was a Depression-era project.
She has survived her classmates who moved to Dallas, where they traded harder work and fresher air for softer pleasures and look where it's gotten them. She outlived her first husband, whose pains from cancer were eased by a concoction that included snake venom. And, of course, never bitten, she has prevailed over generations of rattlers.
Deep in the cave, a half-dozen rattlesnakes were curled up, hibernating. With the giddiness of a tomboy and a wink or two at the onlookers, she slid a long sprayer into the den while J.J. pumped in gasoline from a two-gallon drum to tease them out. The chemical smell wafted through the dank air.
"Why don't you just strike a match and blow them out?" chuckled Floyd Parr, 78.
As the snakes, one by one, slithered out of the rock, she and Kuzenka, armed with long-handled tongs, grabbed them behind their heads, lightly enough not to snap their vertebrae. The rattlers started vibrating, and soon the snake bucket - a small, tightly meshed cage - was buzzing like a forest full of cicadas.
In two weeks she will deposit the snakes into a giant pit at the Oglesby Rattlesnake Roundup, a kind of sensational, old-style carnival where, among other daredevil stunts, one couple will climb into a sleeping bag with dozens of snakes. If Edna's snakes are among the longest, or the shortest, or the heaviest, she will win a cash prize.
Eventually she will sell the snakes, at about $3.50 a pound, to a man who markets them as a delicacy to Dallas country clubs. Edna has tried rattlesnake only once, and she was unimpressed: "It tastes like a cross between chicken and fish."
The practice of collecting snakes with gasoline and the roundups themselves, which also are found in Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Alabama and Georgia, have been roundly criticized by animal rights and environmentalist groups.
The Humane Society claims that the number of livestock deaths from rattlesnake bites is negligible, points out that rattlesnakes control rodent populations and describes the roundups as "cruel and ecologically damaging events" that "violate the most basic principles of wildlife management and humane living."
Investigators have witnessed participants putting coiled snakes with golf clubs and the shutting of snakes' mouths with wire or fishing line so they could be used as props in photos.
At least a pair of roundups in Texas have closed in the past couple of years as the number of hunters has dwindled, said Chris Hamilton, a Dallas photojournalist who is working on a book about the fading culture of the Texas rattlesnake roundups.
"These little roundups were the identities of these towns," he said. "That was their spring festival that gave people a reason to have a parade or a dance."
Edna simply says her work saves cattle and horses from debilitating bites.
"What we do is we try to do everything to help the rancher. They're the people who grow groceries, they grow our meat," said Edna, who was "burning up" when she was told she needed a permit to sell the snakes last year.
The state requires any person possessing more than 25 rattlesnakes for commercial sale or trade to buy an $18 nongame permit.
"I don't know what's happened to our Texas," she said. "After a while you'll need to have a permit to have sex."
In late winter, 88-year-old Edna McDonald dons a camouflage jacket

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