Mack Ginn didn’t get up before daylight to hunt rattlesnakes. He was hoping for a buck when he sat down in his metal ground blind last week. But Mother Nature can be a cruel mistress, and before the end of the morning, Ginn had turned his deer rifle on a different kind of critter.
Ginn told the Mississippi Clarion Ledger that he had arrived at his blind before 6 a.m. with snacks and drinks in tow, ready to camp out for most of the day if necessary.
His blind is small, maybe four square feet – just enough room for one person sitting on a chair to swivel around. He uses a wooden shipping pallet for a floor, and the walls are constructed of metal.
Two hours had elapsed when Ginn heard a noise he wasn’t expecting.
“It was 7:45 when I first heard it,” Ginn said. “I heard a rattle. It echoed in the blind and sounded like it was in the trees.”
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Ginn thought at first it was a cicada, but soon abandoned that theory given the time of year. He checked outside the blind and still couldn’t find the source of the rattling. That’s when he began to suspect it might be a rattlesnake.
Sure enough, coiled between the slates of the wooden pallet, an angry timber rattlesnake was making his annoyance known.
“I jumped up in the chair,” Ginn said. “He was right next to me.
“My foot was on top of the pallet only a couple of inches from the snake. My first thought was to get away. I literally jumped into the chair because there was no way to get away. When I was in that chair, I realized I had nowhere to go.”
The snake began striking the legs of the chair as Ginn perched above it. His only means of dispatching the snake was his rifle chambered in 270 WIN.
He at first used his scope to aim at the snake’s head, but at such close range the shot missed. With his second shot, he placed the barrel near the snake’s head and pulled the trigger.
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“My ears rang most of the day,” Ginn said. “I shot twice. There’s no telling what it would have measured on a decibel meter.”
The second shot did the trick. The 4.5-foot rattler stopped moving and Ginn was free to escape unscathed.
“He had every opportunity in the world to bite me,” Ginn said of the snake. “By the grace of God, I wasn’t.”
He plans to snake-proof his blind to avoid repeating that predicament.
“That ground blind will have a solid wood floor in there,” Ginn said. “I’m putting ¾-inch plywood in it and sealing it. I won’t be sitting on a pallet again, that’s for sure.”