I've got some other stories that are a little more interesting, but I might as well share my first grayband story. Like Gerold, my first was on the river road. My first trip was when I was a senior in high school, summer of 1989. I had just met a new friend Todd Smith, who, along with his father had been to TX several years for alterna. He filled us in on where to go. After driving from CA, my dad and I hunted our first night on the big hill. We met my best friend at the time who had come in another car with Todd's dad Tony. The night before they had gotten a beautiful subadult female. Actually, our dream was just to get a Trans-Pecos rat which, from reading Kauffeld's book, we thought were quite rare. My father told me a story of when we were randomly driving on the river road after visiting BBNP in the mid-70s in a cab-over chevy camper when he slammed on the breaks and picked up a young trans-pecos. I say this because for this trip, as far as we were concerned, a trans-pecos rat was our pinnacle. Well, our first night, after meeting our friends, we saw all kinds of snakes, and probably had seen about 10 trans-pecos when I was pouring a soda over some ice into a coolie type cup and my dad slams on the brakes and my soda goes all over the dash and floor. (I should mention here that there were two sentences that Todd and Tony had imparted to us about hunting alterna that we had been chanting like a mantra. The first was: "they don't reflect" and the second was: "they don't just bite, they gnaw." ) So, after my dad slammed on the brakes, he starts yelling "IT DIDN'T REFLECT, DIDN'T REFLECT, DIDN'T REFLECT" I grab my maglight, jump out of the car, run down the road, pissed that I hadn't seen the snake and didn't have a search image of where it was, yelling at my dad, 'where was it?' and him saying 'I straddled it.' Now before I say what happened, you need to understand how much of a wimp I am - I had been around snakes for years, but the worst thing to me was getting bitten. Usually when I snake hunted, I would keep my right arm in a snake bag, use that to pick up a snake and then just turn the bag inside out quickly and tie it. I didn't have a bag, I ran back closer to the car, and about even with the rear bumper I saw the snake, which didn't seem real, an adult alterna staring at me. I reached down, did a flinch, tried to reach again, wrestling with myself about what I was doing, because all I was thinking was "THEY DON'T JUST BITE, THEY GNAW!!!) and it was as if that snake was going to kill me. Luckily I found my balls and just grabbed it - an adult female. Needless to say that my luck hasn't been so good since, but I'd have to say we were pretty lucky to get an alterna on our first night of ever hunting alterna.
GLENN
