Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species (17 page)

Carter stopped us by the water for a moment.

“Now look, y’all,” he said. “This is a little different from where y’all just came from. Every step you take, you have to be looking for snakes. We got cottonmouths everywhere this close to the water. When you’re along the bank like this, you don’t get close without looking for gators. You see something like a log close by, back up. You see little bubbles near the shore, back up.”

“Yeah, we know,” I said. “We just spent a week hunting around Lake Caddo.” I felt like an old pro in gator country by now.

“That’s nothing like here. The gators are a lot bigger and there’s a lot more of them.”

Carter was right. The area was crawling with alligators, cottonmouths, wild boars, critters of every persuasion.

We set up with our rifles across the creek (which was about forty feet wide and of unknown depth) from what were obviously active burrows. Carter explained that active burrows are always cleared of any leaves or debris in front of the entry. I watched the opposite bank while Carter told Jeff stories of his time in the Louisiana National Guard during Hurricane Katrina as one of only two medics assigned to guard and care for an entire hospital.

A light rain began to fall and the sun was failing us. My scope fogged up. Fortunately, most of my hunting rifles have a scope with quick-detaching rings that enable me to pull it off swiftly in this kind of situation and switch to using the open sights. The chorus of bullfrogs and insects increased to the usual dusk fever pitch. Carter and I realized we would need spotlights in order to continue hunting.

Philippe left to see about a restaurant where we could cook the anticipated kill, and Jeff and Red drove to the store to find spotlights.

Carter had an idea for a new place to hunt while we waited for the others to return. He drove us down a dirt road and pulled onto the shoulder. Somewhere in the dense forest was a lake with an island in the middle. Nutria had burrows on the island and sometimes could be sniped from the shore. The forest was still dripping from the rain. There wasn’t any trail, but we forged ahead.

I have to confess to taking a perverse pleasure in this kind of expedition. I enjoy bushwhacking at night through rough country. I did it for weeks on end during an Outward Bound course in the Smoky Mountains and eventually became perfectly comfortable with it. If I had water, the means to make a fire, and a knife, there wasn’t much that I needed to worry about. I had all of these items and more as we pushed off into the night.

It was a joy to be in Carter’s company as we became really and truly motherless lost in the wilderness. Not only did he have the same appreciation for wandering around in the dark woods as I do, but he was equally unconcerned about our disorientation.

We stumbled across the shore of some body of water and saw many pairs of eyes reflected in the narrow beams of our lights. Alligators of various sizes drifted toward us.

I don’t encourage unfounded fears of alligators. Attacks on humans are rare. Jogging on a path around a pond during the day is usually the most risk taken by people who live near alligators. What we were doing in Louisiana was much, much more dangerous.

During this trip, it had dawned on me that I was usually sitting on the edge of the water, within easy lunging distance of an alligator. It was also usually dark, when it’s tough to spot a big gator. Then what happens when a nutria is actually shot? Odds are that it slides into the water. Even if it’s on the bank, the scent of blood is right there, luring gators to the very spot to which you, the hunter, are making a beeline in order to retrieve your kill.

I decided to take some extra precautions, including making regular sweeps of the water with a light to check for signs of gators, such as rising bubbles and anything that looked like a drifting log. I was glad to have the others with me: People watching out for gators while you’re looking for nutria seemed like a good idea. (It’s also helpful to have someone to call 911 for you, should an alligator circumvent your vigilance.) Even with a gun at hand, the best defense against alligators is to spot them, then get the hell away before it’s too late.

All this was going through my mind as we wandered through the dripping, humid forest — which, I noticed, was permeated by a strange, pungent smell. I asked Carter what it was.

“Cottonmouths. They make that scent when they get mad or you get too close to them.”

Good to know.

Eventually, we figured that we had a river within a few miles on one side, a highway on another, and the back road where the truck was waiting on another. If we walked far enough, we could get our bearings. We might end up walking till dawn, but it would work. We made a straight course for the moon to avoid going in circles, and before too long we came out onto the road within a quarter of a mile of the truck. This was dumb luck; we could just as easily have spent the rest of the night out there.

We met up with Jeff and Red in front of Carter’s house. They had a couple of spotlights, and I felt good about the chances of our getting some nutria. The burrows were there and active, and we had all night to hunt. And as a last-ditch effort, Carter had some traps to set over the holes; there would surely be a dead nutria in one of them by morning.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t go back out to the creek with us, but he gave us permission to hunt his sizable piece of land and offered to show us how to set the traps.

Now, I’m a hunter, not a trapper (rats and mice aside). I had never used one of these things and, frankly, they scared the bejeezus out of me. They scare me even more now that I’ve seen one in action.

Carter’s traps are big iron squares that are placed over the entrances to holes. They snap shut with five hundred pounds of pressure. One false move while you’re setting the trap, and your forearm is crushed. He demonstrated how to set one and I recorded it on video for reference in the field.

We had spotlights, traps, a rifle, a creek full of nutria, and the rest of the night. Red and Jeff had to fly home the next day, but the makings of a successful hunt were all there. We said goodnight to Carter and walked to where the road crossed the creek and where we would begin bushwhacking to the ambush we’d sat in earlier.

I turned to Jeff and Carter.

“Okay, guys, we can do this. Jeff, you carry the backpack with the extra gear and water, and hold the trap before I arm it. Red, you hold one of the spotlights and be on gator duty. Sweep the river along us every few steps and tell me if we’re approaching a big one. I’ll walk point with the rifle, watching for cottonmouths and ready to take a shot at any nutria we see on the way.”

Jeff stared at me as if I was crazy.

“There are snakes out there.
Cottonmouths
. Look what I’m wearing! I’m wearing these low-cut shoes.”

“Well, I’ve only got on low-cut hiking boots myself,” I said. “And look, if one of us gets bitten by a snake, it’s not the end of the world. We’re not gonna die. We’ll each have two people as backup for first aid and to get an ambulance. It’d be a few nights in a hospital, a week or two of feeling sick, and then a great story for the rest of your life.”

They weren’t buying it.

“Carter said there are big gators back there,” Red said flatly.

“That’s why we need a dedicated set of eyes on gator patrol. We’ll watch each other’s back.”

I started to walk into the woods, then turned and saw that neither of them had moved. I picked up the heavy iron trap, holding it awkwardly with the same hand that held the flashlight. My rifle was in the other hand. The camouflage backpack full of first-aid supplies and tools remained at Jeff’s feet on the glistening wet asphalt.

I stepped into the woods on my own.

It was a long, slow trip along the tangled bank. Attempting to watch my own back for alligators while scanning for snakes (which were numerous) was awkward, made more so by the burden of the large, heavy iron trap and my rifle. (The shotgun would have been better, but that was sitting in the trunk of my car, many miles away in the parking lot of the restaurant where we’d met up with Philippe.)

At last I reached an active burrow we’d noticed earlier. My mission was to set the trap, leave in one piece, and then come back in the morning. I replayed the video of Carter’s demonstration on my handheld recorder and, copying his actions, set the trap.

My cell phone didn’t have a signal, and it became painfully obvious that if I managed to snap my hand in this trap, there would be no cavalry to the rescue; Jeff and Red were too far away to hear me shout.

Lacking my pack and tools, I used a pocketknife to cut stakes to secure a trap. I noticed a six-foot alligator watching me from a few yards away. I backed up farther onto the bank to finish shaping the stakes.

Without my hatchet, when it came to pounding them into the ground, I used the butt of my poor rifle as a hammer. At this point, the alligator was not to be seen, which was at first a relief but on reflection was more troubling than when I knew where it was.

A snake of indeterminate species watched from the edge of the water as I set the triggers of the trap as best I could. My work done, I withdrew back to the road.

It was a long ride, in the backseat of Red’s car, to where I’d parked my car, back in Baton Rouge. Probably longer for him than it was for me.

“You know,” I said, breaking the silence, “if the only thing you want out of hunting is killing something, you’re bound to be disappointed.”

Men often get wrapped up in machismo and questions of identity on their first serious hunts. They go out into the wilderness with ideas about who they are and what they hope to become by virtue of their deeds. What they find out about themselves along the way cannot help but either buoy or break them afterward.

The trap was empty in the morning, probably because of my inexpert setting of the triggers. Jeff and Red were soon on their way to the airport, while I was driving to a diner in Port Vincent to meet Philippe for breakfast.

I walked into Fred’s Restaurant and sat down at a table across from Philippe, who was already halfway through his meal with some friends. He introduced me to them, including David Roshto, the owner of Fred’s.

David is a wiry, serious-looking man in his mid-fifties with a dry sense of humor. Philippe explained what I was doing in town and I related the story so far. David invited me to stay as long as I wanted to in the basement apartment of his house on the Amite River, only a moment’s walk away. Philippe was sure any number of people could get us onto some nutria.

It took a lot of cups of coffee to get myself up to speed after the night I’d had. After breakfast, I brought my bags and gear to David’s place. I could hardly believe my luck. After less than twenty-four hours in a new place, I had somewhere to stay, introductions to hunters, a dock to fish from. Most important, I had a place to do the laundry accumulated from a week of haunting swamps.

I took a nap, then returned to Fred’s for a catfish po’boy and a beer. A few of the waitresses and customers offered nutria pointers; all suggested I go out on the swamp in an airboat and ride around until I saw some.

Meanwhile, David and Philippe were asking around on my behalf. That afternoon, we made our way to a boat landing. There we met up with a bunch of their Cajun friends, who had brought a trio of airboats they’d built themselves.

An airboat is basically a flat-bottomed hull with a huge fan on the back of it (powered by the biggest engine the boatbuilder can find — usually something on the order of a snowmobile engine, but sometimes as big as the engine of a small airplane). It doesn’t have any brakes or a reverse gear. Unlike a conventional powerboat, it has no propeller to become tangled up in weeds. Airboats can even move around on dry land when they need to. The ecological footprint is extremely small; unlike with a prop-driven boat, there’s no risk of slicing the back of a manatee.

Every boat is a little bit different, depending on what it will be used for and because each is hand-crafted. The boat I rode in was built to be a work platform along remote oil pipelines through the swamps and bayous, so it was relatively wide, flush-decked, and less maneuverable in tight quarters than would be a boat built for hunting.

A small alligator watched us from the water as David, Philippe, and I each stepped aboard a different airboat with our respective pilots. I rode with Daniel Cupp at the helm. Daniel was born and raised here and has been driving airboats around this very swamp for more than three decades.

The roar of an airplane engine a few feet behind us, separated from us by only a wire cage, made conversation difficult. We pushed along a broad channel, quickly gathering speed. Snowy white ibises and blue-gray herons took to the air as we approached.

Daniel steered us into a narrow channel, where we entered a maze of cypress. The surface of the water was like an undulating lawn covered with algae, duckweed, and grasses that grew from the slightest clump of floating debris. Water hyacinths, occasionally in bloom, bobbed along. Brought from South America by aquaculture hobbyists, water hyacinth has taken over large stretches of water in Louisiana and is perhaps the worst invasive aquatic plant in the country. It impedes water flow, creates ideal microhabitat for mosquitoes, and blocks light from reaching native plants under the surface. Low oxygen levels result, killing fish where the plant is particularly dense.