Marion woman gets her gator on river hunt
Posted on Sunday, September 30, 2007
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Sports/202927/
TICHNOR — On Sept. 22, at 4: 30 a. m, Holly Smith of Marion became the first woman to kill an alligator during a recognized sport hunt in Arkansas.
Smith, 28, a registered nurse who works at Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center in Memphis, killed the gator during Arkansas’ first alligator season, which was held Sept. 22-23. She hunted on Merrisach Lake, on the Arkansas River near the Highway 165 Bridge. The gator was 6 feet, 8 inches long and weighed about 100 pounds.
The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission awarded 40 permits for the hunt through a random drawing. Smith, an avid hunter, didn’t intend to enter the drawing, but her husband, Andy Smith, a trooper for the Arkansas Highway Police, filled out an application for her, anyway.
“When it was first advertised, I asked her if she wanted to enter,” Andy Smith said. “She was hesitant, but I told her, ‘Go ahead. You’re probably not going to get picked anyway because there’ll be so many applicants.’”
Although Holly began hunting when she was 16, she said she’d accompanied her parents to deer camp since she was a small child in El Dorado. She loves to hunt deer and turkey with Andy, but she said hunting gators seemed a little too “hard-core.”
“Now Andy, he’s a big hunter,” Holly said. “He’s the one who entered me in the alligator drawing. I didn’t know if I wanted to do it, but I have been bear hunting and I thought, ‘If I’ve been bear hunting, then, by golly, I can go gator hunting, too !’”
She made sure she looked good doing it, too. Smith said she fixed her hair and wore makeup. As a crowning touch, she wore a pair of big, gold hoop earrings.
“I’ve always been kind of a …, well, I have long blonde hair and big, blue eyes,” Smith said. “I like to hunt and fish, but there’s a time to look pretty. When the guys saw me, I think they were a little, uh … At 4: 30, I didn’t look as good as I did when I stepped out there.”
Assisting Holly were Andy and Brent Reaves of Reydel and Brian Spencer of Wynne. They started at 7: 30 p. m. Friday and saw plenty of gators, but Smith said she missed about eight. Every time she started to get a noose around a gator’s snout, the animal submerged and pulled free before she could get it around the neck. As time wore on, Smith became frustrated and finally lost her composure.
“We probably saw 30, and I missed one that was a little over 8 feet, a really nice one,” Smith said. “I cried over that one. I was so upset. I had to go to the workshop and all, but it was a lot harder than what it was shown to be. I’d get it close around the nose and they’d just back out.”
The snare was taped to a 12-foot wooden dowel. When Smith pulled it tight, the tape was supposed to break, but the gators didn’t give her time. She also had a chance at a 10-footer, but it wouldn’t let her get close.
“A couple of Game and Fish guys were close by, and they saw the whole thing,” Smith said. “I broke down in front of them. I said, ‘Forget this ! I’m just not good enough !’”
Compounding the problem was the fact none of Holly’s helpers had hunted alligators, either, so they had no experience from which to draw encouragement.
“I couldn’t allow them to snare one, but I told them, ‘Guys, if you could try this just one time, you’d see how hard it is,’” Smith said. “I’m a perfectionist, and I try to do everything to the best of my ability. I practiced with my pole before I got in the water. You’ve got everything in your head, and you know how it’s supposed to go. You think you’ve done everything so perfectly, and then you think, ‘Wow ! How did that gator ever get out of this ?’”
Smith didn’t know the names of the AGFC employees, but they inspected her snare to make sure it was properly constructed. They gave her a quick refresher on how to use the snare and, sure enough, she snared the next gator she saw.
“I was ready to give up,” Smith said. “I was like, ‘I’ve missed eight, so I’m obviously doing something wrong. It’s 4: 30, I’m tired, and I want to get out of here.’
“ I’m not a quitter, but I had got to that point where, ‘I’m done, I want to go home and we’ll come back later tonight.’”
They were leaving the area when their spotlight illuminated the red eyes of a lone alligator loafing near an island. Smith decided to give it one last try.
“With this one, I heard the tape when it snapped off the pole and then it started rolling,” Smith said. “It would come up and bang the side of the boat and hiss. Then it got the rope in its mouth, so we had to get it out of its mouth. Water was flying everywhere. It was almost like being at a water park. This went on five or six minutes, and once it settled down, I shot it in the head with a 20-gauge.”
That’s when the adrenaline kicked in and Smith astonished her assistants by hauling the gator into the boat herself.
Smith took her gator to Hi-Tech Taxidermy at McGehee to convert it into a full body mount. She said she named it Allie Sue, after her grandmother.
“She’s feisty, like a gator. That’s why I named her that,” Smith said. “She’s fine with it.”
The Smiths celebrated the hunt by eating some fried gator. Andy Smith said it tastes a lot like frog legs. As for the hunt, he said it was a night he’ll never forget.
“I’m somewhat jealous, but I’m excited for her,” he said. “It was definitely the highlight of my hunting life. I’ve taken a lot of deer and turkeys, but nothing as exciting as that was.”