Once when I was about 10 or 11 years old, probably late June, early July, I woke up early on a Sunday morning, and everybody was still asleep and I was bored. I got dressed and went back in the pasture behind the house, I was gonna go down to this little spring back there, where there were usually little turtles at that time of year. There weren't any cows in the pasture at that time, the fences were needing to be fixed, It had been recently mowed.
I'm walking along, and I'm almost to the spring, and I almost step on this black snake, oh crap, I step back real quick, but I notice that there looks like 2 blue stripes down this snake's back. Well this snake kind of stands up like a dang cobra and looks at me, and scares the heck out of me. I took a couple of steps backwards keeping my eye on him, and he just moves with me, that scared me even worse. He's still kind of standing up and looking at me. He's done showed me that he's gonna follow me, and I didn't like the thought of that. I'm lookin at him and he's lookin at me, I say "BOOO" and I rush at him a couple of steps hopin to scare him off, he just kind of goes sideways a little bit, to keep a distance from me and stops, and stands there lookin at me. I do it again and the same thing happens. I'm lookin around out of the corner of 1 eye for a rock, or a stick, or anything I can grab, and throw at him to scare him off, but there aint anything. I take a couple of steps back again, and he follows me, and stops when I do, it was like he was mocking me, and to me that was freaky as hell and scared me even worse. I done run into a crazy arse snake.
I make a snap decision, and start running a beeline as fast as I can back to the house. There was a place where the honeysuckle had pulled down the top 2 strands of barbwire, and that's where I headed, my little short legs churnin like Jesse Owens, I could hear that snake in the grass behind me, and ran even faster. I was thinking, if I can hurdle that fence at that low spot, that thick honeysuckle might slow him down a little bit. I got there and I did a perfect hurdle in stride and into the grass of our backyard and didn't lose a step. I didn't slow down or look back til I was bustin in to the back door at our carport.
My Dad is there in the kitchen drinkin some coffee and he say's "what the hell is wrong with you boy?!" So I start telling him, and he's laughin like hell, and he tells me that it's a black racer and they would act like that, but the blue stripes don't sound right to him, still, I swore that I saw them.
Later on, I figured out that the stripes were just a reflection of the sky on his scales.
That was a crazy thing to happen to a kid, on an early Sunday morning. I'll never forget any of it.