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Louisiana Deer Hunter Bitten by Alligator After Climbing Out of His Stand
A Louisiana deer hunt turned into a real life swamp tale when a 67 year old hunter stepped off his ladder stand and straight into the jaws of a seven foot alligator.
Keith Price of New Iberia had taken his nine year old grandson, Owen, to a lease in St. Mary Parish for an evening sit. The sun was dropping fast, the woods were getting quiet, and the pair expected nothing more dramatic than a deer slipping across the clearing. Instead they walked into a scene that felt more like a Louisiana version of Jurassic Park.
Price let his grandson climb down the stand first. As soon as Owen’s boots hit the ground, Price heard splashing in a ditch beside the clearing. He figured it was a possum or an armadillo rustling through the palmettos. Seconds later he learned he was wrong, and very wrong at that.
A flash of white inside an open mouth told him exactly what was coming. Before he could react, the alligator surged out of the flooded ditch and clamped onto Price’s right leg. The gator had likely locked onto the first thing it spotted. Price just happened to step between it and his grandson.
“I realized quick it was not a possum,” Price later joked.
With his leg in a vise grip, Price kicked at the gator with his free foot and threw his backpack at it while shouting for Owen to stay back. At one point he even yelled for the boy to grab a bow, though he now admits he is thankful the rope was too tangled for Owen to free it. As he put it, the situation could have gone from bad to worse if an arrow started flying in the dark.
After several hard kicks from his neoprene boot, the gator finally released its hold and paused in front of the pair, hissing in the fading light. Then it slipped back into the ditch and disappeared.
The entire attack lasted less than two minutes, but it left Price bruised, rattled, and extremely grateful that the gator never reached his grandson. The bite tore the back of his boot and left teeth marks across his shin, but he was able to walk out under his own power.
When they got home, Owen answered his mom’s question about how the hunt went in a way that only can come from a kid raised on the bayou, “No, mom. No deer. But Paw got bit by an alligator.”
Local wildlife agents later removed and euthanized the gator involved in the attack.
For Price, the story is one he will be telling for the rest of his life. And for hunters everywhere, it is a reminder that in Louisiana, the action does not always end when you climb down from the stand.
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