Fanged: County man learns of snakebite danger

By Pennie Embry, Staff Writer

STIGLER, June 25 — Lying on the wooden table, they seem to be exactly what they are. A simple pair of leather work gloves. Something to protect hands from thorns, splinters and other dangers and debris associated with clearing land after a long winter and weeks of spring rain.

But to Jimmy Pearson, those gloves are much more. They are the opening of a story he is likely to tell many times in years to come. They are a reminder of the day last week when an afternoon of yard work turned into five days in the hospital, half of those in the intensive care unit.

“I was mowing my yard with the push lawnmower,” said Pearson, who lives in rural Haskell County. “I started cutting around one of the trees when something got caught in the mower. I thought it was a piece of bark, or maybe a branch.”

But when Pearson flipped over his mower, what he found tangled up in the blade was neither bark nor branch. It was a mutilated water moccasin, one he estimated to be at least five feet long.

“That thing had to be as big around as my wrist,” said Pearson. “So I had my gloves on, and I began pulling pieces of the snake out. And the last part I pulled out was about a foot long, and it had the head on it.” And the head, like the snake, was big. “Real big, about the size of a silver dollar.”

Unfortunately, the large, dead snake was not exactly dead. When Pearson grabbed that particular chunk of the snake, he felt a painful, burning sting — like a bad bee sting — on his right hand.

“That thing had enough fight left in it to bite me all the way through my leather glove,” Pearson said. “And it only had one fang.”

What happened over the next few minutes seemed to take forever, Pearson recalled.

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