MARSH MADNESS
Titillating Louisiana ‘gator hunt not for fainthearted!
By Mike Handley


One of the mudboat’s rudders was malfunctioning, often forcing Morgan Perrin to nose the homemade vessel into the reeds before slamming it into reverse in order to negotiate tight right turns. Whenever the former automobile engine grumbled and the craft shot backwards, decaying black muck boiled to the stagnant water’s surface and a rancid, sulfurous odor assaulted our nostrils.

Cruising the network of narrow, weed-choked canals within the marsh near Barataria, La. (north of Lafitte), we were hunting for alligators. I should note here that ‘gators, once considered an endangered species, were pronounced as fully recovered and removed from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s list in 1987. In the Louisiana marsh, literally crawling with them, alligators may be hunted during the month of September.
There is an easy, although scary way to fill a tag - by dispatching the reptiles that have been hooked on lines baited with chicken quarters. And then there is the hard way that I’d elected to try, which is more like spotting and stalking.

When doing the latter, the potential for a shot lies beyond every bend. More often than spotting alligators, however, we’d merely spook gallinules too fat on marsh flora to even fly. These chickenlike birds would practically skip across the duckweed carpet - wings beating just enough to keep them from sinking - to disappear into the nearest wall of vegetation. Some of the males, red beaks aglow, wouldn’t even bother to exert the effort.

Before we left the floating clubhouse, The Lodge of Louisiana, I’d asked if we were going to be hunting marsh or cypress swamp, hoping for the picturesque, moss-draped cypresses often invoked by the novelist James Lee Burke. When I was told that we’d be in the marsh, visions of grass and sky came to mind (boring, I thought). I wasn’t prepared to like it at all, so the unexpected beauty of the place left an even greater impression.

I was treated to birds that I’d only seen in books, like ibises and giant white egrets; squawking great blue herons; blue-winged teal and scads of ducks; the purple conflagration of water hyacinth blossoms and a wild strain of brilliant morning glory.
Neither the heat nor the mosquitoes were as bad as I’d expected, perhaps because of the steady breeze and cloud cover spawned by Hurricane Isidore well south of us in the Gulf of Mexico. The insects were worse at dusk, when we sat on porch swings under the orange glow of “bug lights,” munching fried ‘gator tail at Morgan’s camphouse.
But I digress.

Two hunters, Sigarms CEO Herb Rudolf and gun writer L.P. Brenzy, had already tagged huge alligators. Herb’s was a 10-footer, and L.P.’s a 12-footer that scared the bejeezus out of him when it chomped onto the front of the boat - after two .243 bullets had failed to do anything except anger it. I’ll never forget the sharp crack of Fiberglass as the beast’s teeth sank into the bow, nor can I shake the visage of L.P.’s saucer-sized blue eyes as he danced inches away from the maw.

Both ‘gators were shot “on the line.”
“It doesn’t seem as sporting as shooting one in the open,” Morgan proclaimed. “But you get the added thrill of the tug while bringing in the line, and you’re inches away from something that wants to eat you. It’s more like fishing, but a whole lot more fun!”
Since mine is not a fishing magazine, however, I had no interest in lines or hooks. If I were going to be able to write about this unusual adventure, I’d have to shoot one on the fly. I might like to return one day to set out and bait the lines myself - as if I were setting out limb lines for catfish but, on this trip, I was determined to rely upon my prowess with a rifle, albeit a different one from my favorite, battle-scarred Remington.

As a guest of Sigarms, I was cradling the tack-driving Blaser R93 (chambered in .270 Winchester). And with one day remaining, it fell to me and wildlife photographer Lance Krueger to take our shift in the boat’s bow. Lance was shooting the same Sig Sauer rifle that L.P. had used to collect his toothy lizard (when shot no. 3 finally connected with the peanut-sized brain).

The first ‘gator we spotted on that final day was a real dinosaur. Even from a distance of 300 yards, there was no doubt that it would dwarf the bull that L.P. had shot. Morgan knew this old boy, too. He’d hunted it several times.
Just as I found the swimming reptile’s large head in my scope, however, it disappeared behind a clump of water hyacinth. And by the time I stood to see over the floating mat, the alligator had sounded. While Herb pointed out that we’d never shoot one if we didn’t squeeze the trigger, Lance and I locked gazes. Without saying a word, we tacitly agreed that a 300-yard, offhanded shot, at a moving target, and from a moving boat, was not our cup of tea.

Faced with the final hour of the hunt in the approaching dusk, however, our resolve tightened. As the sky darkened, more by the approaching storm clouds than the still viable sun, alligator sightings increased. Lance missed a nice one before I had a chance to spot it with my naked eye. A little later, he, Herb and Mark Kresser, also from Sigarms, all fired at another one from inside of 100 yards. Again, the untouched creature submerged before I could fire.

About 6:00, we rounded a bend and saw a ‘gator swimming across the narrow channel ahead of us. My first two shots, as well as all three of Lance’s, fell short - as reported by the crew in the back of the boat. With one bullet left, I held an inch over the critter’s head and squeezed the buttery trigger.
Almost instantaneously, everyone cheered when the alligator’s tail came straight up out of the murky water as it somersaulted.

“How far do you think he was?” someone asked.
“I don’t know ... maybe 70?” 1 responded.
“Oh no, that was 200 - minimum,” declared L.P., who makes his living knowing such things. “That, my friend, was one heckuva shot!”
The true distance never occurred to me. I had been looking at the baseball-sized target in my scope, which was cranked up to 9-power. It honestly looked like 70 yards, and I would’ve written just that. But my experienced compadres had been looking at the ‘gator without the aid of optics.
“Cool!” I managed, humbled by my feat.
“Give me that rifle,” Lance muttered, handing his own off to someone behind us.
We returned to Morgan’s camp just long enough to tag my prize and for me to pose for a couple of photographs. I wanted more, but I felt guilty for cutting into the remaining half hour of hunting time.

While the hunt resumed without me, I plopped the heavy 6-footer atop a table on the dock. A few minutes later, Morgan’s cousin, Ronnie Perrin, strolled out of the camphouse with skinning and filet knives in hand. As the night sounds grew louder and the mosquitoes and yellow flies began prowling, Ronnie went to work.

When the skinning was done, we moved the butchering indoors to escape the bugs. Those that followed us wound up as supper for the contented tree frogs clinging to the window screens. As George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s voices poured from the portable radio, I got my second ‘gator anatomy lesson.
The first was seeing what a .270 can do to an alligator’s dense skull, which ain’t pretty!
Editor’s Note: This hunt took place in the middle of thousands of acres of private marsh, well past the time when teal hunters might have been hunting the distant neighboring tracts. In nearly all other settings, shooting a rifle across water is not recommended, unless at point-blank range of a hooked gator.