Youthful Fun on the Farm

Having just gotten back from visiting Neil and Kay in Florida, it occurred to me that there was another adventure that I haven't touched on that happened probably 60 years ago.
Neil and I were down at the creek, (Morgan Creek), northwest of Neil's house near Greens Fork. I remember that we were wading in very shallow water and found a fair sized piece of wood floating near the bank. We had to see what was under it and when we picked it up we found what was probably an 18" snake lying there. Immediately the smallish snake turned into at least, (in our minds), a 6 foot copperhead. We managed to put some distance between us and that poor snake.
As if that wasn't enough though we had caught a pretty large Leopard frog. Having carried it around for a few minutes we decided to let it go. Immediately after releasing the frog a 3 foot, (in our minds again), "Cotton Mouth Water Moccasin" swam to the frog, took it in his mouth and started to swim away. That infuriated us as we had just played catch and release with the frog and considered him ours.
We picked up rock after rock from the floor of the creek and bombarded the snake unmercifully. We finally connected and the snake released the frog. We continued to bombardment of the snake until we thought we had him killed. Then took sticks to him to deliver the coup-de-Gras. We started toward the house with the snake draped limply between us over one of the sticks.
As we were walking back I happened to look down in time to see the snake's head lifting toward Neil's hand. It didn't take me long to drop my side of that stick.
We proceeded to finish the task we had begun and carried the now dead snake to the house. Aunt Babe, (Neil's mother), got the encyclopedia and found a picture that resembled our snake, and which was a cottonmouth.
Since cottonmouths have never been found that far north, I suspect now that it was a banded water snake. The copperhead was probably a garter snake.
That adventure sure seemed a lot more exciting then than it does now. If killing that snake was illegal then, I trust the statute of limitations has run on this event and I hope the PETA people will be forgiving toward the sins of our youth. One of the 3 conspirators from 60 years ago,
Dan C