Watch Your Step

Trouble was, see, the gator was between me and the tree. And to make matters worse, he knew it!

So how are you at hopping? Kicking? Screeching?

Caught out in the way-too-open crossing a pond dam, there was but that one 10-foot-high patch of green. Oh, I’ll admit it wasn’t much of a tree; but it did present one very valuable option: elevation! Forgive me for what could possibly be construed as evil thoughts Mr. Game Warden, but for probably the only time in the last 30 years I wasn’t even wearing a handgun!

He hissed and hissed some more, clacking jaws and sweeping his tail. I found myself kicking, kicking, kicking…

And that’s what I was doing when I woke up.

WHEW!!!

Alligators and I have a long history. They don’t seem to like me very much. Or maybe they do, and simply haven’t managed to get quite close enough to add proper seasoning and sauce.

A couple of times, they came mighty close—and I was wide awake…

The 10-footer you’re looking at here was not much of a threat. I was on a big boat, she slithered along beside it. No big deal…
But we eventually turned a corner in the river, and she disappeared—for a little while.

 Later, idling back around that corner, she came rocketing and hissing like a demon from a hidden cut behind a high bank, and hit the water like a ton of bricks.

I think she was reminding me: maybe not this time, but…

One gray, mist-swirling daybreak many moons ago, I was slipping down the bank of the Ogeechee with a licensed trapping buddy en route to checking a gator set roughly 600 yards directly out the front door of Love’s Seafood Restaurant near Richmond Hill. The public boat ramp is between Love’s and that set. You know what easing along in murky gray day is like in a river swamp; and if you don’t, take my advice and go find out…

All the while, I’m thinking that if this gator has taken the bait—and its enclosed hook—he’ll be in the water and I can handline him in.

Wrong.

Reached for a handhold on a small sapling—and he reared up right under it! The guy behind me, a first-timer who wanted to see what this gator-catching was all about, will likely never forgive me for flattening him in that black river mud while sounding Retreat.

Loudly.

Fortunately, the bull HAD taken the bait and his motivational prospects were fairly limited by the  length of parachute cord tied to a stout limb. Only a 7-footer, but I’ll always believe that he had the sauce ready and waiting…

Gators don’t have to bite in order to put a hurting on you. I’ve written before of the President Street 12-footer. All that one managed to do was slam my ribs into dock rails so hard that I thought they had just become cracklins. 

And that was for starters. The six-hour wrestling match that followed—featuring a pair of sky-ripping deluges—had my shoulders and arms griping for weeks.

Surprisingly, that old gator cooked up pretty tender…

There was seldom a time when my bear-hunting compadre and licensed agent trapper Jackie Carter failed to have a gator tied out in one of the small ponds behind his home. A length of nylon rope would be looped to a post, the other end sinking innocently underneath the water as Jackie would instruct some newbie: “Hand me that rope…”

It was bellylaughs all around when  the “something” it was hung on was yanked to the surface…

All these episodes… and suddenly it slapped me in the noggin that breeding season for gators—when they go to skulking like crazy through backyards and parking lots—is weeks away. Here we go again; I can’t wait…