Tonight, On Hick of Backroads' Wild Kingdom...

That Hick! He's such a spotlight seeker!

For several days now, he's been dropping hints that I'm not writing about him enough. Not that he even knows what a blog is, or ever expended the effort to read the one story I've since published about him before signing away his rights. Such a narcissist is Hick.

Every time I sit down at my living room laptop, or walk through the upstairs square footage over my dark basement lair, Hick heckles me. "Hey! You're always writing stories about me. You haven't even asked me about my snake story."

No. I have not. Is that something you would think to ask YOUR spouse? Oh, honey...what about your snake story? Yeah. I didn't think that was quite the mainstream marriage conversation topic that Hick imagines it to be.

Tonight, just after we both pulled into the garage at the same time, and right before Hick left for his bowling league, I hit on that bait. "Hey, what about your snake story?"

"What snake story?"

"For days you've been hinting that you want to tell me a snake story. So I can write about it. Did you have an encounter with a snake?"

"Well YEAH! I opened up the BARn door, and there was a snake laying in the middle of the floor!"

"And...?"

"What do you mean?"

"What kind was it? How big? Did you kill it? Did you catch it? Did it bite you? Is it still there?"

"It got under the workbench. I was afraid I'd lost him. But I reached under there and drug him out. He was this big." Hick held his arm straight out from his waist, with his fingers and thumb in a pinchy grip.

"You held him by the tail to measure him?"

"Yeah. And he tried to BITE me! So I pinned his head down with an 'L' clamp."

"Then what?"

"I threw him out the door, past the burn pit. AND HE STARTED TO COME BACK IN THE BARn!"

"Imagine that."

"So I grabbed him and carried him up the field and threw him down the sinkhole."

"Wait! You carried him across the field?" That's a distance of about 100 yards. Hick is no Usain Bolt.

"Well, I couldn't let him come back in the BARn!"

"You dangled him by the tail and carried him across the field?"

"No. He balled up around my arm. And he kept trying to bite me. So I held his head away with that 'L' clamp. Then I threw him down the sinkhole with all the other stuff." He means things like kitchen cabinets from our old house, and various dead critters, and junk that even he doesn't want. Hick regards sinkholes as nature's wastebaskets.

"Threw him down the sinkhole, as in SPLASH? Or threw him down the sinkhole as in the depression covered with dead leaves that slopes down to the hole in the rock?"

"Just down in the big hole, in the leaves."

"He's a SNAKE! He lives in the leaves. He'll come right back out."

"Yeah. But it'll take him longer to get back to the BARn."

"You know that he was in your BARn because he's eating something, right? Mice. Now you'll have blind pink hairless baby mice in your coverall pockets again. Instead of a snake to pick up by the tail."

"Aw. There'll be another snake."

Our Hick is no Marlin Perkins. He doesn't have Jim to do his bitey dangerous work. Hick is his own Jim.