- Welcome to my man cave. Come on in.
As you can see, we like to hunt not just alligators.
Our line of work, the wintertime we have off,
so we get to spend a lot of time in the woods.
Dad’s always brought me up
deer hunting in the swamps and whatnot,
and now that I’m older, we do a lot of traveling
all over the United States
and even in Canada.
As you can see,
we’ve had some pretty good hunts over the years.
Growing up, I always was intrigued by taxidermy work,
and my local taxidermist took me in under his wings
and taught me, you know, the ins and outs of it.
I do love doing it.
I’ve done some of the animals in here.
These deer right here on this wall were all done by me.
We got a little mixture of everything.
These at the top up here are some elk that I shot in Montana.
I shot ’em in back to back years.
It was pretty neat trying to get them things up there,
to say the least.
Well, that duck is up there by himself
because most of the time,
basically, all I’ll hunt is white-tail deer.
I’ll go on a couple of duck hunts at the end of the year.
I have a picture here on my wall that I love,
and so I’m trying to mimic that picture right there.
Hopefully, this year I’ll go and shoot a few more ducks,
and then I’ll start placing ’em in that corner
the same way that they look in this picture.
But I’ve traveled up to Canada and shot this real big bear.
He was just a big old bear, first bear hunt I ever went on.
You know, deer are scored by the inches of antlers,
and bears are scored by the width of the skull.
Once it dries out,
it’s the width and the length of the skull.
You definitely don’t want this guy clamping down on you.
And, of course, our prized possession right here
is a giant alligator that we caught one day.
He was 12-foot-4. He broke the line.
We had to chase him down the river for several miles
and caught up to him.
And as I was pulling the trigger,
the gator bumped the end of my barrel,
and right when I pulled the trigger, it split my barrel.
So a conversation piece, to say the least.
As you can see right here,
I still have that tooth from that alligator last year
that bit the other alligator in the head and broke his tooth.
This is the old snaggle-tooth tooth.
- Look at this.
- Oh, my God.
Oh, my God, look at that tooth!
- Just the thickness of that tooth
just shows you the power he must have put in
to biting that alligator and just snap it off like that.
And, I mean, it just fit right back in there,
so we know absolutely
that was the alligator that killed that other one.
You know, my love for hunting
comes from my dad and my grandpa.
It’s been passed down for years and years.
I remember not even being able to walk through the swamp.
My dad would carry me on his back
and bring me rabbit hunting with him and deer hunting.
I have my very first deer.
When I shot it, my dad mounted it for me,
and I have it up top up there.
And then this is my little boy’s
very first buck that he shot,
he shot last year at six years old.
And I got to experience that with him,
so that was pretty special and something I’ll never forget.
We do our part to try to help out.
We do some hunts throughout the year
where we take kids out
that they don’t get the chance to go out there.
We take some out and do some hunts with ’em
just to get the experience, you know.
We get to do it all the time and we take it for granted.
But we’ve learned a lot over the years
that, you know, you don’t have to look very far
to see somebody less fortunate.
You know, I keep a little tally
of how many deer I’ve shot over the years,
and I’m a little over 100 right now.
You know, people say, yeah, you shot so many,
you don’t remember anything,
and I can tell you the story of every single deer I shot.
Dad might be the King of the Swamp,
but they call me old Buck Master Junior right here.