The lady and the gator

I keep going back and looking at the picture. The gator is so huge it doesn't look real. It's like a plaster caricature in the dinosaur exhibit at a museum. But it is real and very dead. The blond woman crouching in the back killed it.


Her name is Maryellen Mara-Christian, she lives in Massachusetts, and hunting is her hobby. Her husband is a bear-hunting guide. They hunted gators in Louisiana on their honeymoon. But she didn't get one then. They came to South Carolina looking for a gator to kill.

They found it at Lake Moultrie, one of the two Santee Cooper lakes between Columbia and Charleston. The lakes are known for great fishing, underwater stumps that can wreck a boat, and a healthy population of gators.

Here is how you legally kill a gator in South Carolina. You can't just shoot one swimming free. You have to hook it, usually with a stout fishing rig. They hooked this gator several times. Then you're allowed to shoot it, but this gator was so big, a shot from a .22 didn't do the job. But by then, pierced and shot, the gator was weak enough for Mara-Christian to finish it off. She took a knife to the back of its neck and cut its spinal cord.

The great hunter is 5-5, about 120 pounds. The gator was 13 1/2 feet, 1,025 pounds. It's the biggest one I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of gators.

My dad used to bass fish with a guy named Nick who was a little crazy. They'd come around a bend in the river and run up on a bunch of gators on the bank. Nick would cut off the motor, flick his fingers in the water and make a little clicking sound in his throat. Sure enough, one or two of the gators would slide off the bank and head their way.

My dad would say, "Nick, that motor better crank." But most of the time the gators lost interest. They don't mess with you unless you mess with them.

I don't get the point of hunting one down and killing it just to say you did.

Hunting to feed your family is fine, even honorable, considering how most of our meat gets to the table. I don't hunt, but most of the men in my family have at one time or another, and we all fish. But taking a big, magnificent animal off the books, just for the thrill of it, seems worse than cruel. It's a false show of dominance. It's ending a life just because you can.

Or maybe it's so you can get on TV.



It's been a week since the woman killed the gator, but I keep going back and looking at that picture. I watch a lot of nature documentaries, and the common theme is that the natural world is ruthless. To survive the first day out of the nest is a tremendous lucky break. To make it to old age, for most animals, is beating lottery odds.

Alligators live to be about 50 on average. Scientists know of a few that made it to 70 or more. They can be vicious, of course, but only when feeding or protecting their turf. This gator was so old and fat that only 40 pounds of its meat was worth saving. It survived for decades in the wild only to be killed for a trophy. Human nature can be ruthless, too.