I couldn't have been more than seven or eight years old, nine at the most. We were living on a sharecropper tobacco farm in North Carolina. Mother told me to get some eggs from the chicken house, so I walked across the yard to the barns, then stopped cold in my tracks at the sight of a copperhead snake draped across one of the logs at the base of the hen house. When I could move my legs again, I turned and ran back to the house.
Mother called my brother Charles from his bed and the next thing I know, I'm standing some yards from the chicken house; Charles is kneeling with his arms around me from behind helping me to hold his .22 rifle. I do not remember pulling the trigger, but I do remember the kickback.
After that we probably gathered the eggs and went back to the house to eat some scrambled ones. To my best recollection, that is the first and last time I ever shot a gun.
