1 - I wasn't actually hunting, but ... I was in Afghanistan, and had been working with another unit on some things, and they kindly let me know that they had acquired some steaks and chickens and were going to light some fires and grill the meat, and when I should arrive to consume my share.
As I walked past their field sanitation "wee-wee" tube area, which was surrounded by stacks of sandbags, I was startled to see a *large*, coiled-up snake on one of the sandbags, glaring at me. I stepped back quickly and raised my weapon ... but the shiny black snake was not moving.
It seems that early that morning, a soldier from their unit had gone to do his business at the "wee-wee" tube, and this large, black cobra had coiled around the tube he selected to use, in order to gain some warmth from the decomposing material that had been deposited down the tube. He killed it with his 9mm when it rose up and flared its hood. He and his buddies then arranged it on the sandbags to startle passersby.
2 - Back home in AZ, I was hunting quail with my Brittany one fall, and she charged into some tall grass and weeds as we made our way toward a wash I wanted to hunt. I was trying to catch up to where she was bounding through the weeds (a little Brittany will bounce herself up several feet in the air to get a look at where she's going when the grass or weeds are too high) when I heard something rustling near my feet and then a rattling noise.
That was scary, but it wasn't quite as scary as nearly falling off the edge of the 15' drop over the side of the wash when I suddenly stopped running a few moments later.
We hunted up the wash, but walked back to the truck a different way.
3 - That dog is always finding stuff - rabbit legs, cat skulls, dead birds, etc. One time, she found a live black cat hiding in a bit of brush. Only, that particular cat seemed to have a white stripe on its back. Luckily, she will call off most things. Not usually rabbits, but that skunk had her confused, and it wasn't running away, so she decided to leave it there and go look for more birds with me.
4 - Hunting in a dry river bed with large cottonwoods and poplars overhanging the sand and so forth. The Brittany was running up and down the wash, nosing brush and so forth, but then stopped and started clinging to my legs. I got up to where she'd been when she turned around and came back to me, and saw some
really, really big paw prints in the sand, resembling a cat's paw print. And me with a 20guage and a couple handfulls of #7 1/2 shot loads. We turned around and headed back to the truck, me scanning those big, heavy overhanging limbs a bit nervously.
