The Snake and The Rat

Daughter, Beth, and three grandchildren from Falls Church, Virginia, visited the Powell farm last week. Both planned and not planned farm experiences happened during their visit. Eleven-year-old Cole told of one of them in a note left on grandmother’s typewriter.

“Good morning everybody. Today is Thursday, August 27, 2009. I am typing this in Temple, Oklahoma. A few days ago my Granddad caught a rat in a trap. He was going to show me the rat today, but when we got to the trap we saw a snake with a bulge in its belly where the rat was. The snake was able to slide into the trap and eat the rat, but when he ate the rat he was too big to get back out of the trap. My granddaddy then told a story about a wolf who got into an orchard through a hole and ate all of the apples but was then too big to get back out.”

The postscript to the story is in the photo above. The next time we visited the snake, he had spit out the dead and stretched rat and escaped through the holes in the trap on an empty stomach.

Harold