After some less than artful fiddling with the hockey stick I flipped the copperhead into the Rubbermaid tub and closed the optional latching lid.  Just for insurance I wrapped a bungee cord around the container in a loop as a double lock.  I put the tub in the shade - an important detail - and called my brother-in-law, a skilled herpetologist named Jim, like the one in Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom with Marlin Perkins.  Jim would have to come pick it up.  Notice I call the snake three names.  "It" when I want to be far away, "Pierce" when I feel sorry for it and "copperhead" when I want to remember what it does for a living.  Back to Jim.  Jim teaches at a local university and needs a copperhead to make his native poisonous snake collection complete, for classroom purposes I guess.  I call Jim on the phone.  No answer.  A day goes by.  I went out and checked on Pierce.  He looked at me with that eye again.  There is something hypnotic in those snake eyes.  I think maybe when a snake sees people, it sees all their blood vessels outlined in red with its snake vision and sends you a vibe about it.

Long story short.  After several calls it turned out that my brother-in-law was out of town for a week.  The next day when I came to check, he had pooped frog remains into the nice clean green plastic tub, the snake that is.    As a general rule I don't like to keep animals in dirty cages, so the tub was going to have to go.  I wanted to put it in a clear, well ventilated terrarium, the kind with a ribbed top.  We had to hold it a week for Ranger Jim.

What started out as a dirty crusty rusty terrarium was scrubbed and scrubbed with sudsy water, and finished with a finger nail brush for the ribbed air breathing top.   I went over and over it.  "There", laboratory  quality.   It was spotless.  I dried it and it gleamed in the sun. A tribute to science and zoology.  But then I started thinking.  That filthy snake has staph and strep and all kinds of flesh eating bacteria on its fangs.  What if I get bitten, survive the poison, and die of an infection?

It became clear that I needed to give the snake a bath before I put it in the gleaming terrarium, and here is where the story really begins.  The, "It became clear" part  is where my wife and I disagree.

You see, its one thing to say, "I'm going to give that venomous snake a bubblebath", and its quite another to do it.  The trouble started when we tried to get the snake out of its home in the green tub and into the pail of sudsy bubblebath water.  It kept escaping onto the grass amidst our yells and screams.  Our feet danced like Mohammed Ali.  Fortunately I was almost prepared.  I had these old-people-tongs that old people who have fallen down and can't get up use to reach over and grab things, but the mouth on the tongs didn't match - they didn't capture the snakes body correctly.  For that matter, they don't work for things old people want to grab either, but that's another story.  The snake was extremely powerful in its wiggling and torsion.  The snake wouldn't listen to me as I tried to use the old-people-tongs to pick it up and put it in a red pail containing the sudsy bath water.  Pierce just didn't want a bath.  It got out on the ground.  The copperhead changed his personality from riverONile snake into Mr. Wiggly coil and slither.  I grabbed old faithful, the hockey stick before it got away and pinned it down while and my wife captured it with the Rubbermaid tub by leaning it one side and coaxing it along with the old-people-tongs.  It struck at the side this green tub it called home and then promptly slithered inside.  It was very quick at striking compared to how slowly it moved.  You could skip and keep up with it as it slid across the grass, but when it struck it was as fast as the blink of an eye.

Take two: I tried to transfer it again into the bath water, and the same thing happened again.  It was a little freaky and felt dangerous.  Oh - one detail - since we were live a little out in the country I was doing all this naked except for my underwear.