The Gator Story
This little story is from my uncle in Corpus Christi. He’s a lawyer, but otherwise I have no reason to doubt its authenticity. It smells like an urban legend, but we have pictures! It involves an interesting attack by an alligator. As he tells it…
One of my former partners owns a ranch about an hour’s drive from here near the small town of Refugio. There’s a pond on the ranch and, in most years, alligators in the pond. For several years in a row he got an annual permit from the regulatory authorities to take an alligator. I was part of the alligator team. (I even got an alligator hunter’s license from the State.) It was my job to help drag the dead alligator up the bank of the pond. That’s what I did the first year. The second year, we didn’t get an alligator on the first day of the hunt, and I had business on the second day that kept me from participating. The excitement happened on the second day in my absence. Perhaps it was just as well that I wasn’t there, because I might have been sitting in the back seat of the truck.
Here’s how you “hunt” an alligator: You get a very big fishhook, the kind that is used to fish for sharks. You get a chicken and let it sit outside somewhere for a few days until it gets rotten and smelly. You bait the fishhook with the chicken and tie a stout rope to the hook. At the alligator pond, you tie the free end of the rope to a sturdy tree. You drive a board vertically into the bank of the pond at the water’s edge. Extending horizontally over the water at a 90 degree angle from the top of the board is another board. A clothespin is attached to that second board and you clothespin the part of the rope that’s adjacent to the stinky chicken. What you end up with is a stinky chicken with a wicked hook inside it, dangling over the water, held only by a clothespin. The alligator reaches up (or jumps up or whatever), grabs the chicken, and swims off, pulling the rope loose from the clothespin. Eventually, he swallows the chicken and the hook ends up working loose and hooking him in the guts. (Yes, I know. It’s cruel.) How high you hang the chicken above the water determines the size of the alligator you’re most likely to get, if any.
You go back to the pond the next day, and if the stinky chicken is still dangling over the water, you drive into Refugio, eat Mexican food, drive back to Corpus Christi, and go back to the pond the next day. If, however, the stinky chicken isn’t hanging from the stake anymore and the rope that’s tied to the tree is very taut and extends out into the water, and if every once in a while you see a great big swirl in the water, then you’ve caught an alligator. Someone pulls on the rope until the alligator surfaces, and then the chief alligator hunter shoots the alligator in the head once or twice with a deer rifle. You pull the dead alligator to the shore and you let it lie there for an hour to make sure it’s not moving anymore. The literature cautions against omitting this step, because even after the alligator is dead his tail may whip around reflexively from time to time with enough force to cause damage. (This is a significant clue to what happens later, at least according to one theory). After you have waited for the alligator to stop moving, you drag him onto the shore and to a pickup truck for transport.
Why would a person hunt an alligator? My partner got some boots and other leather goods made from the hides. The meat tastes like chicken, albeit a bit chewy.
On the occasion of the truck story, neither my partner nor I could go on the second day of the hunt, and so he sent a couple of younger lawyers and a legal assistant to the ranch to see if there was an alligator on the hook. It turns out that there was, and it was a big one. After dispatching the alligator, the hunters spent some time making calls on their cell phone to try to get someone else to come help them get the alligator in the pickup, because they didn’t think there were enough of them to handle the job. They couldn’t find anybody to come help and so they drove into Refugio, thinking to hire someone to help them. That didn’t work, and finally, they decided to try by themselves. By this point, it had been over an hour since the alligator had been shot.
They struggled quite awhile trying to wrestle the dead alligator into the bed of the truck. At one point, they tied a rope behind the gator’s front shoulders, so that one of the guys could get in the bed of the truck and pull while the others pushed from the rear. They gave up on this tactic. They left the rope on the alligator. (This is a significant clue to what happens later, according to a competing theory.)
Eventually, they were able to get the carcass into the truck with this method: Each man grabbed the head and put it on the tailgate, then they all moved backward a little and hoisted the front shoulders onto the tailgate, and continued to work their way backward like this until the whole thing was slinkied up into the truck bed. The truck had a front and a back seat. It also had one of those heavy-duty toolboxes mounted across the bed directly behind the cab.
By this time, the hunters were exhausted and very dirty. They piled into the truck, the driver starts the engine, and they start to drive back home. When they’ve gone 15-20 feet all hell breaks loose. There is a terrible banging and shuddering of the truck. The guy in the back seat hears breaking glass and feels something coming through the back window of the cab. Without turning around to look (because he already has a pretty good idea what it is), he dives over the front seat and ends up somewhere in the floor under the dashboard. The truck has come to a sudden stop, and the guys in the front seat bail out the doors.
This is what they see once everything has come to a stop: The alligator’s body is contorted over the toolbox in the bed of the truck, with its head crashed through the back window into the cab. The toolbox and the back top edge of the cab have been damaged. The alligator is completely still.
The next day, the guys involved are at the office telling this story and are convinced that the alligator crashed through the back glass of the truck because it was still alive, or because it came back to life for a few seconds, or because of one of those post-mortem reflexes alligator hunters are warned about. They were justifiably excited to think that just moments before they had been embracing this same alligator while trying to get it into the bed of the truck.
As they continued to tell the story, however, some other facts emerged: After everything had settled down at the scene, the men discovered that the free end of the rope they had been using earlier to try to haul the alligator into the bed of the truck had fallen into the space between the cab and the bed. They found that what had been the free end of the rope was now completely wrapped around the truck’s drive shaft. (I believe they discovered this fact after finding that the truck wouldn’t move when they tried for the second time to drive away from the scene, but I don’t remember for sure about that.) The other end of the rope was still tied tightly around the alligator’s shoulders behind his front legs.
Someone suggested the possibility that what actually happened was that the rope got tangled in the drive shaft, and as the truck started driving off, the drive shaft started rolling up the slack in the rope very fast until, when there was no more slack, the drive shaft began winching the alligator up and around the toolbox and flipped him back over the toolbox toward the place where the rope led down under the truck. (See attached picture). The momentum then threw the alligator’s head through the back glass of the truck. According to this theory, the truck then came to a sudden stop when the drive shaft couldn’t turn anymore. As near as I can tell, the men who were involved reject this theory, and as the story is usually told, it and the fact that the rope was tangled around the drive shaft are not mentioned. The truck was totaled. (Can you imagine being the adjuster that got to look at the photos, hear the story, and decide which box to check on the claims form? I’m guessing it was “other.”)
(A week or two later, the owner of the truck, who had been driving it at the time of the incident, was at a deposition in San Antonio when someone started telling this wild story he had heard recently about an alligator down in Refugio that had come back to life in the bed of someone’s truck and crashed into the truck cab. The truck owner confirmed that it was true, explaining that it was his truck and that he had been there to see the whole thing.)
Personally, I believe the Winch Theory. But most people who tell the story seem to enjoy the Death Throe theory so much more. So I generally keep quiet, not wanting to be a spoilsport. (Maybe my skepticism just comes from envying the men who were actually there and got such a good story out of it.)
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