This happens when you start Christmas morning with a volcano bagful of the finest -- Since I made it this far, I gotta share with you guys.
I used to do a trick up at my hunt club that in my knowledge no one (or anyone I ever heard of knowing about) ever did. I used a Swiss Army knife and a sekrit rattlesnake-strike characteristic to do it:
I'd move my right leg as close as I could get to the buzzer in relative safety. I'd lean forward, bringing my left hand in and out quickly to the side as a target.
My Darling Witch forbade me to do this trick after I missed the timing and a rattler went
over my hand, scraping a bloody scratch with its bottom teeth.
New guys at the club were naturally always thinking the guys were pulling the long bow telling about it, and Herself relented and said I could do it one more time but they would have to make a movie of it so there would be no more temptation.
The trick: A rattlesnake gives a tiny
frisson down part of its back about a fifth of a second before it strikes. My left hand (target) had better be moving away quickly as soon as I see it.
The snake would strike where my left hand just was, and my right hand would come across and hit the buzzer right behind the head... either stunning or killing it. The one in the movie was only stunned, so the new guys at the club looked a me like I had three heads as I came walking back to them with the writhing rattler in my hand.
Years later, Crocodile Dundee
imitated me by casually busting the neck of a big poisonous snake.
Here is a still from the movie. Picture my left hand whipping in and out of striking range...