By Billy Davis

Rule No. 1 of alligator hunting: don’t get eaten.  

Rule No. 2 is more complicated. If you catch a gator, with plans to release it elsewhere, make sure you release it where you want it to go.

Failure to follow Rule No. 2 has created some backyard drama in south Batesville, where a seven-foot-long alligator has made a home in a pond.

“I saw him. He was swimming towards us. That was all I needed to see,” said Brenda Brown, who is building a two-story home at 215 Kornegay Road with husband Calvert.

The Browns’ wooded property backs up to a two-acre pond, where the gator has made itself at home for about a year and a half, she said.

The Browns were told their new neighbors had caught the animal from a farmer’s cow pond. It was hauled to a nearby home in the bed of a truck, awaiting a new destination, when it escaped.

“It made its way through the woods until it found the water,” explained Mrs. Brown, who said she isn’t fearful of the alligator, except the time when it started swimming towards her.

“That convinced me, beyond a doubt, that there was an alligator back here,” she recalled.  

The Browns are also grandparents to four grandchildren, hence the fear of the gator lurking in brown water or high weeds when little ones walk by.

She said one of the grandchildren has named the animal “Gator Dundee.”

An alligator attack has never been recorded in Mississippi, where it’s illegal to kill alligators except in designated counties, said Scott Baker, a wildlife biologist for the Miss. Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks.

Mississippi alligators were once protected by federal game laws but the state now oversees their protection and limited hunting, said Baker.  

“Alligators are very rarely aggressive,” Baker said. “They’re generally shy, but they can lose their fear of humans if they’re fed.”

Whoops.

“The neighborhood kids told me they’ve been feeding it,” Mrs. Brown reported.

Mrs. Brown was looking for the alligator for a reporter — the reporter was looking really hard, too, and walking really slowly — when a gaggle of neighborhood children drove to the pond on three four-wheelers.

In the murky pond, a pair of eyes turned out to be a leaf.

A tail and a hind leg turned out to be neither, just a well-placed log.

After 20 minutes of looking, Mrs. Brown and a reporter decided to give up the search, mostly so juvenile four-wheeler riders watching from the other side of the pond wouldn’t see two adults trip over each other as they ran away.

Mississippi wildlife officials attempted to snag the alligator last week, with a hook and rod and heel, but it escaped.

They are set to return soon with a trap and chunk of meat, Mrs. Brown said.