'I had nowhere to go': Mississippi hunter battles rattlesnake in deer stand

'I had nowhere to go': Mississippi hunter battles rattlesnake in deer stand

JACKSON, Miss. – When a Mississippi deer hunter went to his stand Dec. 28, he was hoping to come across a big buck. Instead, he came across something that gave him one of the biggest scares of his life.

"I have a metal ground blind," Mack Ginn said.. "It's up on cinder blocks.

"The blind has been there a long time. It's a small blind; maybe 4 by 4 (feet). You have just enough room to walk in, sit, and swivel around."

Ginn said he arrived at his stand at 6 a.m. He planned to spend much of the day in it, so he brought drinks and snacks. When the blind was originally placed there, it had no floor, but Ginn had a wooden shipping pallet that fit perfectly, so that became the floor. Ginn placed his snacks and drinks on one of the pallet's slats next to a wall.

Gin had been in his stand watching for deer for close to two hours when something startled him.

"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."

Ginn looked up in the trees through a window thinking it might be a cicada, but then realized cicadas would not be active in late December. He then looked down at the ground outside the blind, but saw nothing there either. 

"That's what it sounded like, but a lot louder," Ginn said. "That's what I thought initially."

Ginn said he'd never heard a rattlesnake rattle, but started thinking that if he could imagine what it would sound like, it would be the sound he was hearing. When he pulled his head back in the blind, he saw a rattlesnake between the slats of the pallet.

He was trapped with a rattlesnake

"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."

Ginn had no room to maneuver in the small blind to get out of it. With the commotion of Ginn jumping in his chair, the snake became more agitated and was striking at the chair each time it moved. 

He missed at point-blank range

Ginn took aim through his scope at the snake's head, fired, and missed. Scopes are great tools for shooting at long distances, but at a couple of feet, not so much. Ginn then put the barrel close to the snake's head as the snake was striking at it and fired.

The snake was dead and the rattling stopped, but now his ears were ringing from firing a high-powered rifle in a metal building no larger than a typical public restroom stall.

"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 snake measured about 4½ feet, had eight rattles and girth larger than a canned drink.  

'He had every opportunity in the world to bite me'

"It floored me," Ginn said. "I've never even thought I saw a rattlesnake, and then I see one three days after Christmas."

He was also surprised that he wasn't bitten.

"He had every opportunity in the world to bite me," Ginn said. "By the grace of God, I wasn't."

Now that Ginn knows timber rattlesnakes exist on his land, he's making a few changes. He typically does not use a flashlight when coming in and out of the woods in the dark, but he does now. He also plans to change the floor of the ground blind.

"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."

MMW