One morning one of those horses bucked pretty hard. Fred was there and saw it. He said, “I saw a lot of daylight between you and that saddle. Looked to me like you was about gone.” I told him, “Oh no, that’s the way I ride, kind of loose.” I don’t know if he believed it or not but the fact was I was just about thrown off. The headquarters consisted of a dugout for a home, no floor in it and a couple of bunks made out of cottonwood poles, and a corral. We melted snow to make coffee and cook with as the water hole was frozen and about all we had to eat was sour dough bread and black coffee. Of course, Fred being a great hunter, we had plenty of deer meat. Soon after I came there the sugar was all gone so we didn’t have any sweetening the rest of the winter. As soon as the weather broke so I could get out I quit Fred and left that part of the country. Some time afterwards I was back in that locality and went to his camp. There was nobody home. It looked like nobody had been there for some time. I looked around and found some grub. It was a very warm day in the summer so I picketed my horse and laid down on Fred’s bed in the dugout to take a rest before getting something to eat. While I was lying there I saw a snake’s head appear out of a hole in the dugout. It looked as big as my hand and when he got his whole body out he was a monster. He was about four feet from me and saw me. He stuck his tongue out at me a few times and crawled across the dugout to where there was a grub box and got about half of his body in it and stopped. I raised up on my elbow to see what he was doing. He had his head in the sugar sack. I was twenty-five miles from where I could get anything to eat. I saddled up and beat it out of there. That was a bull snake (Gopher Snake) but he sure didn’t look good to me and he took all of my appetite, eating out of the grub box. I saw Fred some time afterwards and told him of my visit and of my leaving without eating. He seemed very much surprised that that should bother me any. He said the big fellow had been with him a long time and that they were great friends. He also said the big fellow didn’t allow no rats or mice to come near the camp.