Gator hunting: a love story
A man. A woman. A boat full of weapons and rotten meat.
PORT ARTHUR — On a Monday morning in mid-September, a dozen men gather in an outbuilding at J.D. Murphree Wildlife Management Area, trading big-fish stories.
They’re the lucky participants in Texas Parks & Wildlife’s annual alligator hunt. In a couple of hours, they’ll take off into the bayou for the next two days. For now, they’re killing time before orientation. They swap boat specs. They talk gear. The air is thick with testosterone and the muddysweet scent of chewing tobacco.
It’s serious business. Several times, someone points out that they’re “hunting a beast that can hunt you back.” But when Nancy Halliburton-Sample, of Spring, walks in, their faces slip into half-smiles.
“Forget your camo?” a hunter who’s driven from Fort Worth asks her. Decked out in camouflage, like the other men in the room, he looks like he walked out of a Cabela’s catalog.
Nancy — the only female hunter present — is dressed in pink. Her long, wavy hair is loose. She tucks it behind an ear with a manicured finger.
“I’ll get changed before we go out,” she assures him. She’s polite, but her voice has a bless-your-heart edge.
For the record, camouflage doesn’t help catch gators. “Alligator Hunt” is a misnomer. The two-day quest is more akin to fishing than hunting. On Day 1, hunters attach their bait to a line tested to hold at least 300 pounds; most use a quarter chicken, left in the sun a couple of days. They secure the line to a long cane pole, shove the pole in the ground and drive their boats away. On Day 2, they return, hopeful that the hook has relocated to a gator’s belly.
Most of the men have been here before. Each year, hundreds of Texans apply to a lottery for one of 150 alligator tags issued to JD Murphree for September’s three-week alligator season.
Nancy applied once before, in 2014, when she began dating her husband, Mike Sample. She wasn’t picked then, but they made up for it by going big-game hunting out west. She discovered her inner huntress. This year, she applied again for an alligator permit and got one.
It’s her first go at a gator.
After changing into a white fisherman’s shirt, a camo skirt and matching hat that says “Hunt Master Mike’s Girl,” Nancy is ready to roll. She follows Mike into their jon boat, and they follow a wildlife director into the marshy hyacinthcovered water.
The boat putters through the bayou to Compartment Seven, the mile-or-so swath of 3-to-4-foot swamp water that is Mike and Nancy’s designated area. They calmly survey the scene. Sure, she’s new to this, but he’s done it before — more than a dozen times, catching alligators in every increment from 6 feet through 12. Except a 10-footer. And though it would be nice to bag the biggest gator of the bunch, he’d rather plug the hole in his straight with a 10foot catch.
“That looks like a good spot,” says Mike, pointing to a gap in the tall reeds on the bank.
Nancy nods, grabs a torn-up towel from a zip-top plastic bag and ties it to the reeds. They’ll tag a few spots like this until they find the best one. They have two cane poles and two permits — one apiece — and they talk about returning home with two gators, besting JD Murphree’s 50 percent success rate of the season so far.
She’s heard Mike explain his alligator strategies before, but she asks questions as she ties the cloth. Why here? What should she look for? She learns to search the reeds for openings, depressions where a prize-size gator may have waddled.
“Ideally, I like to have a semiopen area,” Mike says. “They don’t want to come and swim through trash. They want a clear area so they can get up from the bottom. It needs to be 3 feet deep so they feel safe, where they can just grab it and go under.”
Nancy’s a quick study. A few minutes later, after rounding a bend, she suggests another opening as prime placement. Mike pauses to look. It’s a sweet spot. They get to work setting their pole.
“Ooh, look at that. This is about to get stinky,” Mike says gleefully, as he holds up a beef heart that’s sat in the sun a few days. It’s so ripe that the shrinkwrap has bloated: The meat is floating in a bubble. Mike pops the wrap with a knife, and out rushes the smell.
If Nancy sees him turn his head to gag, she has the good grace not to mention it. Instead, she rolls up her sleeves and asks, “What next?” They work for the next several minutes, hooking the bait and attaching the line to the pole with rubber bands, before hanging the beef heart 18 inches over the water — high enough to keep it away from immature alligators, but low enough that a 10-footer could easily call it lunch.
“Empty rags?” Mike asks, holding out his open palm, like a TV doctor asking for a scalpel. Nancy hands him a rag and watches as he dips it into a can of chum, coating it in a gator love potion of rancid chicken juice, and ties it to the pole for added allure.
A half hour later, they’ve moved about 100 yards past their first trap, around another bend. Amid the quiet symphony of crickets and frogs, they hear twigs snap on the shore. They stop in their tracks. Nancy’s eyes grow wide as a smile spreads across her face.
“That’s a big one,” Mike whispers. “Do you want me to catch it for you?” he asks, like he’s offering to lasso her the moon.
She kisses him. Thanks, but no thanks. She may be Hunt Master Mike’s Girl, but Nancy wants to catch her own alligators.
She doesn’t know what surprises people more: that she’s out hunting gators or that she fell in love with Mike Sample.
They knew each other — vaguely — in high school, but no one ever would have thought she’d become Mike Sample’s favorite person. He was a few years older and had a reputation as an outdoorsy, dirtunder-his-nails guy’s guy. Nancy was a girly girl whose nails were covered in pink polish. Neither gave the other a second thought. They grew up, ma people and had ch each started caree logistics, she’s the of a flooring comp years ago, after the Facebook, did they Flash forward a fe and they were bot
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Before heading back to shore for the day, they pause for a picnic of salmon, cream cheese, crackers and grapes beneath an umbrella. They continue telling the love story: Mike asked Nancy on a date and took her to a white sand beach on his boat.
“She’s really good to hang out with, and then I started thinking, ‘Man, I like her. I like her a lot,’ ” he says. “So I got my first kiss on the beach on the river — I asked for it. I didn’t just take it, I asked for it. But the best part about it was the second kiss. Anybody can get a first kiss. But the second one? You did something right.”
Nancy smiles and pulls a grape from the bunch to offer her husband. “Our girls love to hear that story,” she says of her teenage daughters.
She loves to tell it. When she was a teenager, she’d never expected her happy ending to include stinky beef hearts. Or the alligator-skin thong bikini she hopes to make from tomorrow’s catch.
The next morning, the couple launches their boat as the sun rises into a glowing yellow sky. Bubbling with excitement, they wind through the familiar path.
“Please let there be something on the line,” Mike says as they round the bend near the first pole.
The pole’s tip comes into view first. Then the black line hanging from it. It doesn’t stop 18 inches above the water like it did yesterday. It continues straight down.
“Line is down!” Mike whoops. “Line is down! That’s a good thing.” Nancy’s eyes pop. “Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh,” she says. She picks up the line and starts pulling.
There’s resistance. A lot of resistance.
From the line’s angle, it’s clear the alligator’s head is close.
“I saw his tail way over there,” she says, pointing off the starboard quarter.
“Way over there?” Mike asks, incredulously. “That’s 12 feet away, Baby.”
A 12-foot gator isn’t impossible, though it’s rare. But Nancy knows what she saw.
Mike takes the line and pulls at it, feeling the gator’s strength. “It’s a tree shaker!” he yells, pulling with more force until a massive head bursts from the water, jaws open.
“It’s a good one! It’s a good one! Whoa!” Mike yells, tugging it above water again. The gator tries to jerk away and snaps its teeth, angrily splashing water into the boat.
It’s not a 12-footer. It’s better, just what he wanted.
“Ten foot! It’s a 10-footer!” Mike booms.
Nancy grabs the shotgun. The alligator is big, but her target is tiny. Gators are mostly hard, strong creatures, but there’s a soft U-shaped spot on the back of their skull where their medulla oblongata is located. If she gets a clear shot there, the gator will die instantly. She loads the gun. “Let me plant my feet,” she says, standing wide.
Mike feeds her rapid-fire instructions. Put your foot here. Snap the shotgun and pull the hammer. Put the barrel over the boat’s edge. “I got it,” she says. “There,” he tells her, pointing to the target.
There’s a bang. The smell of sulphur fills the swampy air. The water runs red.
“That’s what I’m talking about!” Nancy shouts.
“Let’s wait a minute and see if his eyes close,” Mike cautions. “If his eyes are open, he ain’t dead.”
But Nancy is too far into her victory dance to focus on anything other than her adrenaline.
“That’s called girl power right there!” she hoots. “That’s what I’m talking about!”
“See his eyes opening again?” Mike interrupts. “We’re going to have to shoot him again.”
She shoots again. And when that isn’t enough, she grabs a blue-handled knife and jabs at that soft spot.
In the end, it takes three shotgun shells and one go with the knife, but Nancy Halliburton-Sample has captured her first gator — a 10-foot1-inch, 237-pounder that takes up most of the boat.
They duct-tape its mouth shut and work together to roll the alligator aboard. It smells like rotten meat and territorial cat musk.
“My legs are shaking,” Nancy says, with a smile that breaks her face in two.
Back on land, the men from the previous day are trickling in. Some caught something, mostly about 7 feet long — the average gator caught at JD Murphree this season was 7-foot-7-inches — though there is one 11-footer.
“That’s a hell of a gator,” the camo-clad hunter from yesterday muses as Nancy and Mike pull up.
He’s talking to Mike. But Mike won’t take the bait.
“Thanks,” he says. “My wife got it.”