He Catches Bears for a Living. Snakes Still Scare Him to Death.
We had a group of guys down from Georgia to hunt pythons with us, and one of them, Preston, made it clear early on that snakes were not his thing.
That part didn’t add up to me at first. Preston works with Georgia’s DNR catching bears for a living. He runs hog dogs. He’s fine wrestling three-hundred-pound animals with teeth. But snakes? Not a chance.
“I don’t know, man,” he told me. “It’s just the concept of the thing. Creepy, crawly.” He said he’d take a big hog over a small snake any day of the week.
His buddies wanted to ease him in with something small first, training wheels before the real thing. I wasn’t having that. If we were going to get Preston on a python, we were going to find him a real one.
We got our shot after dark, once the sun dropped and the swamp came alive. The dog worked a big one up a tree, and once we had eyes on it, it was the biggest snake of the night so far. Then Preston did something I wasn’t sure he’d actually do. He grabbed the tail.
“Once I got a hold of its tail, I felt really good,” he said after. “I was like, all right, that didn’t freak me out.” First snake he’d ever touched in his life.
We stopped to get a photo with the catch, and that’s when the bees showed up out of nowhere. Preston’s holding onto a ten-foot python with both hands while getting stung, and instead of letting go and running, he stayed on the snake.
Somebody said it best: he traded his fear of snakes for a fear of bees that same night.
The rest of the trip only got better. The crew picked up a few iguanas together, working as a team to run one down before it hit the water. Then we broke out the bows for some bowfishing, and Preston picked up a blow-dart gun and turned out to be one of the best I’ve put one in the hands of. He was stacking fish while his buddies were still finding their aim.
A guy who couldn’t stand the idea of touching a snake walked away having caught his first python, taken a bee swarm without flinching, and turned into the best shot on the boat by the end of the night. That’s exactly the kind of trip that makes this job worth it.
