Serpent! -- a story of a man, his son, and a snake

I had an amazing encounter with a 7 1/2 foot Coachwhip. It's not rare for me to run across Coachwhips, but this was a rather special situation. Quinn and I were standing next to the vegetable garden when we noticed our cat quietly laying on his belly out in the middle of the field. Now this wouldn't be unusual except it was 97 degrees and the cat should have been in the shade. While standing there and pondering why this was, I saw a dark snake head rise up out of the grass just in front of the cat. Naturally we sprinted over to where the cat was and found this rather large Coachwhip coiled in a defensive position. I asked Quinn to run to my car and get the camera so that we could add this one to our reptile pictures, and I stepped in front of the snake to keep him from slithering off. Here's the weird part: He rose up like a cobra and challenged me, which is unusual to say the least. Very few snakes wouldn't seize the opportunity to flee, but this one just kept coming towards me and striking. I slapped him/her down several times, sending the snake flying completely off the ground, but it would recover and come back at me again very aggressively. It was a bit comical because Quinn was running just as fast as he could carrying the camera and I was dancing around trying to keep the snake in one place. At this point it occurred to me what was causing this unusual behavior. I was standing between the snake and his/her nest which has been in an old gopher tortoise burrow since last year. Some of you may have seen the pictures I have of two Coachwhips in a courtship dance from last year, and it was precisely in this location. Before Quinn could get the camera to me the Coachwhip lunged at me (for the twentieth time), bit me in the thigh, raced between my legs and literally dove into the burrow. Attached are pictures of the skin the snake was shedding at the time. I estimated there was two feet of skin still on the snake when we disturbed it and the skin we picked up measured 5 1/2 feet long. The last two pictures are from last year, amazingly one year almost to the day!
I have read that some cobra's are aggressive like that. The fact that this snake was able to rise up well over two feet off the ground gives me some perspective of them, though had this been a cobra, the outcome would have been terribly different.

Cheers, Kevin