118 Poisonous Snakebites Later, He Is Still a Believer

Over nearly 40 years, Dewey Chafin has been bitten 118 times by poisonous snakes. His fingers are twisted and withered, his body covered with tiny blemishes, his days often spent recuperating in bed.

Sometimes, says the nation’s best-known snake-handler, the pain makes him wish God would take him home.

And always, he is convinced that when the time comes, he will succumb to a reptile’s bite.

“That’s the way I’d like to die. It’s really the only way I can think of,” said Chafin, 62. “There’ll be a lot more snake bites before then.”

Chafin remembers nearly every bite. The first was a copperhead, which nabbed him on the hand in 1960.

“It hurt something terrible,” he said.

The most painful was the black rattler that got him on the left thumb one Sunday night 16 years ago. The pain kept him awake for 14 days. And the most dangerous, he said, was the 5-foot-long diamondback rattler that sunk its fangs into the skin over his right eye. “I was pretty worried there for awhile,” he said.

Despite the pain, and the death of his sister to a rattlesnake bite in 1962, he has never received medical treatment for a bite.

“It’s a little out of the ordinary but not unheard of,” said Michael Ellis, director of the Southeast Texas Poison Center in Galveston.

Ellis said pit vipers, which include copperheads, rattlers and cottonmouths, don’t inject venom in about 25% of their bites. In most others, they inject only a fraction of the venom they are capable of releasing.

He also said people can develop a tolerance for venom as they are exposed.

To Chafin, the explanation is much simpler.

“I always figure God will take care of me. If he wants you to die, you’ll die. If he wants you to live, you’ll live,” Chafin said.

“It’s always the same. It’s a victory over the devil. . . . The serpent is a symbol of the devil. When you have power over it, that’s God having power over evil.”