Wrong Rattler
January 8th, 2009
A folklorist’s field report from north-central Texas summarized the basic story:
“A man kills a rattlesnake ad throws it into the yard on his way into the house. A person in the house wants to see the rattles; so later, after dark, the man returns to the yard, finds the snake, and cuts a long string of rattles off. The next morning he finds the dead snake int he yard with rattles intact. The implication is that he has cut the rattles off a live rattlesnake, and only by luck has he escaped being bitten.”
(Source: Brunvand, Jan H. Encyclopedia of Urban Legends. 2001.)
