Rattlesnake Gives 2 Friends Nightmare Fuel After They Catch Reptile Swimming Toward Them

A Texas science teacher accidentally caught video of herself and a friend getting the scare of a lifetime!

Brooke Howard, a fifth-grade science teacher, was fishing on Caney Creek near Sargent, Texas, with a friend over the weekend of April 13 and 14 when she spotted a snake swimming very quickly toward them.

During her trip, she was taking videos of animals in the creek to show her students and liven up her lessons on Monday — so she decided to film the reptile, which she originally thought was a harmless, non-venomous, plain-bellied water snake.

"...I am not scared of snakes anymore," Howard said from behind the camera in the video obtained by PEOPLE, egging on the animal good-naturedly. "See, here he comes, come on, little buddy."

Off-camera while narrating and filming the snake's rapid movement, Howard realized that she'd misidentified the species and corrected herself, next misidentifying it again as a diamondback water snake, which is also non-venomous, according to the Missouri Department of Conservation.

But at the end of the 39-second video, Howard saw something that signaled danger — the snake had rattles.

She cut herself off after describing the black-patterned snake as "non-venomous" for most of the video.

"Wait a minute, is that a rattlesnake? Oh My gosh, I think it is a rattlesnake, I'm not kidding," she said to her friend before the video ended abruptly.

Speaking of her experience to Chron, Howard said that after turning off the video, she and her friend noticed that the snake didn't swim out the opposite side of the dock, so they took the dog they had with them and went back to their house.

"We didn't go back because we were stressed it was waiting for us," Howard told Chron.

According to The Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, D.C. Eastern diamondback rattlesnakes have a "painful, venomous bite, which can be fatal to humans."

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"The toxin in their venom, called hemotoxin, kills red blood cells and causes tissue damage," the zoo's site continued, noting that human deaths from rattlesnake bites were rare.

Chron reported that the last time a diamondback rattlesnake was spotted in Texas was in 2022, in footage taken on O.H. Ivie Lake near San Angelo, Texas, by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and shared on social media.