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CHARLESTON GAZETTE (W Virginia) 04 May 06 ‘It wasn’t the snake’s fault’ - Inattentive hunter survives encounter with timber rattler (John McCoy)
As he reached across a fallen log to gather a handful of moss, Paul Harvey felt something sting the back of his right hand.
Harvey swiveled his head to find the source of the sting, and what he saw chilled his blood — the catlike pupils and the flickering black tongue of a 5-foot timber rattlesnake.
“I knew right away that I was in trouble,” said the semi-retired coal miner. “The nearest phone was 45 minutes’ drive away, and no one was around to help me.”
Today, a full week after the snake struck, Harvey still feels the bite’s aftereffects. His right hand remains swollen and sore, his right arm bruised nearly to the armpit from internal hemorrhaging. His blood platelet count remains abnormal.
But at least he’s alive, a prospect that looked pretty iffy on the morning of April 27.
“I went out that morning with three things in mind,” Harvey said. “Hunting for turkeys, hunting for mushrooms and hunting for moss.”
He headed into the rugged, remote part of Nicholas County that surrounds the lower Gauley River canyon upstream of Jodie, his hometown on the river’s south bank. The turkey hunting wasn’t good, but the mushroom and moss hunting made up for it.
“I must’ve found 150 morels that morning,” he recalled. “I was collecting moss at about 11 a.m. when I got bitten.”
Harvey — who said he’s had “many, many close encounters” with rattlesnakes without ever having been struck — made the classic mistake most people make when they run afoul of venomous serpents.
“I wasn’t watching what I was doing,” he said. “I reached across a log to grab a piece of moss, but I had my head turned the wrong way and couldn’t see where I was reaching.”
The rattler nailed him as soon as his hand came into range.
“It didn’t start rattling until after it bit,” Harvey said. “Then it started buzzing up a storm.”
The two fang marks on Harvey’s hand measured at least an inch and a half apart.
“That was a big snake,” said the 55-year-old. “It was very dark, almost black, and its head was the size of my fist. Its body was as thick as my forearm. Coiled up, it was the size of a No. 3 washtub.”
Before he’d covered the 25 yards back to his truck, Harvey began to feel the venom’s effects.
“My lips and the tips of my fingers started to tingle,” he said. “By the time I’d driven a mile, my peripheral vision was gone and everything ahead of me started to go blurry, just as if I was looking into the sun. Then I started getting nauseated.”
For nearly 20 minutes, Harvey fought to control the truck as dizziness and waves of nausea racked his body. “I’d drive a while, then pull over and throw up for a while,” he said.
Still less than halfway to the nearest civilization, Harvey realized that his situation had become dire. Stopped beside the road in his truck, he wondered if he’d get out of the predicament alive.
“That’s when my friend came along,” he said.
Roger Kiser, a fellow turkey hunter from Swiss, pulled up behind Harvey’s truck to see what the problem was. “I told him I’d been bitten by a rattlesnake,” Harvey said. “He drove me the rest of the way to safety.”
They stopped in Koontz Bottom to call an ambulance. The ambulance took Harvey as far as Gauley Bridge, where a HealthNet helicopter picked him up and flew him to Charleston Area Medical Center.
“By then, I was slipping in and out of consciousness,” Harvey said. “I don’t remember much about the flight. All I saw was the sky.”
Doctors at CAMC began pumping antivenin into him almost as soon as he arrived.
“I know they gave me at least five vials of it,” he said. “And all kinds of other stuff — antibiotics, potassium, magnesium and a lot of stuff I’d never even heard of.”
The treatments pulled him through. He said his still-abnormal platelet count might spur doctors to administer more antivenin before they discharge him, but he hopes to return home “pretty soon.”
“I can’t wait to get back into the woods,” he said. “It wasn’t the snake’s fault that I got bit. I stuck my hand right where he was. The difference between this and all the other close calls I’ve had is that I was more careless.
“I can tell you one thing, though. I’ll sure have a more respect for what rattlesnakes can do to me this time around.”
It wasn’t the snake’s fault’

They didn't make the snake out to be a monster, the guy survived, and he said it was his own fault-maybe there's hope after all. If the snake truly was 5 feet, that's one I'd pay to see. The biggest timber I have seen was actually a skin, not a live snake, and a touch under 4 feet-I thought that was big.
Too bad a guy with that positive of an attitude had to get bit.

I see it differently. I'm not glad he was bitten by any means; however, I think if it had to happen to someone and have a story put in the newspaper about it, this is the best kind of person to cite. I mean, how many stories have we seen of bites where the person rambles on and on about how dangerous and evil and vile these disgusting creatures are compared to this one, where the guy admits his mistake (while passing on some very good information to the public) and respects the snake's place in the ecosystem? If even half the printed bite stories were like this, I think we'd all be better off.
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Chance Duncan
www.rivervalleyexotics.com

I didn't think about it that way. I would still love to see a timber that big though. The only live ones I have seen were zoo snakes ranging from 2-3 feet-still cool to see, sure, but the big critters are still impressive-especially alive.