USA TODAY
GREENVILLE, Miss. (Clarion Ledger) -- In a battle one man described as epic, two hunters spent seven hours battling an 11-foot alligator that they caught the first night of gator season.
Matt Brooks of Greenville, Miss., had never been on an alligator hunt before, but was selected for one of 810 permits that the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks issued this year, the eighth year the state has allowed the hunts.
He asked Hinds County Circuit Judge Jeff Weill of Jackson, Miss., who had hunted alligators before, to come along.
On a bayou south of here, the two set out in the darkness in a small aluminum boat. The first alligator got away, but at 9:30 p.m. Friday the hunters got a second chance.
"We just threw the hook out there and latched on," and off they went, Brooks said. "It was epic. Everyone read Old Man and the Sea back in school, and that's what it felt like. The recurring thought I kept having was that something was going to go wrong at any minute."
During the next seven hours, a number of things did go wrong that could have caused them to lose the alligator or their lives.
"We had two lines on him. And he periodically broke them and we had to retie," Weill said. "That happened three or four times."
After hours of being dragged up and down the bayou, the pair pulled the animal near the boat. Then the feisty reptile that they later weighed at 350 pounds set the struggle in motion again.
"He slapped the boat and slapped me in the knee with his tail," Brooks said. "It scared us both. Then we knew how big he was."
While the big gator still had some fight left in him, Brooks and Weill got him to the boat for the last time at 4:30 a.m. Saturday.
But it still wasn't over.
"At one time he slipped out of my hands," Weill said. "Fortunately, Matt had him by one foot or we would have lost him."
Though their alligator is considered large based on data the wildlife department already has received, it isn't the largest killed so far this season, which ends Monday in Mississippi's public waters and Oct. 1 on private lands. One report lists a gator several hundredths of an inch shy of 13 feet, and another hunter has said he landed a 660-pound animal. So far more than 200 alligators have been harvested.
Brooks doesn't have to worry about the one that got away, but does think about what he might have done differently: "At some point, I would have welcomed more people to join the fray."