Blind justice

As soon as he started talking about hunting, Ville Platte native Alex “Sonny” Chapman, Jr.’s face lit up, and his smile lingered as he reminisced over old hunting stories and the bond he shared with family and friends. Mounted wild game adorn his law office, each animal holding a special memory.
When asked how he got started with hunting, Chapman said, “It all started when God created man. God put hunting instincts in the first human being’s DNA, and He put all this game out there for him to be able to try and capture, kill, eat it and survive. That’s still in every human being that’s born. As we become more urban with grocery stores and everything, we haven’t had to rely on those hunting instincts, but they’re there, instinctively in us.”
Chapman said he grew up squirrel hunting with his dad. Back then, his dad and friends would use dogs to retrieve the squirrels. West Bay, a wildlife management west of Oakdale, is where Chapman cut his teeth on squirrel hunting without a dog. It was also the first time he and his friends went there without their fathers, when they were about sophomores in high school, just starting to get their drivers’ licenses. “It was a beautiful hardwood forest then. Now it’s about 90% pine. At one time, hunting at West Bay was like the biggest event. That’s where all the squirrel mania and Squirrel Day came about. A lot of it’s attributed to West Bay, starting in the early 1960s.”
After squirrel hunting, a teenage Chapman tried his luck at duck hunting. His friend Kenneth had some family land, a rice field, on Miller’s Lake. “I can still remember that first duck hunt,” said Chapman. “There were 500 ducks on the water. Walking to the blinds, the ducks all flew away. The next field was full of geese just honking away. I got in the blinds and slowly but surely the ducks started coming back. We didn’t kill that many, but I’ll never forget that night. I’d close my eyes, falling asleep ... the image of the ducks flying, circling the decoys, had imprinted in my brain.”
Chapman did not start deer hunting until later in life, when he was an undergrad in college. He tried hunting in West Bay but did not have much success. He then joined the Catahoula Hunting Club in the Atchafalaya Basin. He and the hunting club took trips to Colorado and New Mexico for big game hunting. Now, his favorite deer-hunting spot is in the hill country in Texas, about an hour north of I-35 and Austin, since he started there in 1988. He has bought a non-resident license every year since then. “It’s just beautiful, different country from what we hunt in ... open, rocky, brushy.” He and a group of 10 other hunters from around Evangeline Parish usually go on a four-day hunt in hill country.
In the early 1990s Chapman first tried turkey hunting. He started in Texas, saying the birds responded to the call. “If I had to pick one hunt to only do, it would be wild turkey. I’ll hunt around Toledo Bend for the Louisiana birds. It’s rough country to get them to come in, and it’s not as many birds, but I love Texas turkey hunting!” He said hunting turkey is a spring sport because that is the breeding season. He pointed to the turkey mounted on his wall. “You can see by this bird here, he’s got his fan out, he’s got all that red color on him. It’s to attract the hen, make her realize how virile he is. That’s the beauty of the turkey hunt. You make the sound of the hen turkey. He hears that, and it becomes a kind of a Mexican standoff about who’s more in love than the other. He’d rather her come and watch him strut.” He said if the male does not see a female come to him, he will go toward the call, and it is exciting “When you see him coming, and you see that fan, and he’s slowly making his way to you.”
Chapman does a little squirrel hunting on opening weekend, but now he does it more with family than another gang of hunters. “It’s a tradition, and I want to keep the tradition, because hunting has meant a lot to me in my life. It’s a touchstone.” He said he really wants his family to know even if he only hunts squirrels one morning out of the year, they should try to make the effort to do it on Squirrel Day. It has become more difficult for him because of his eyes, and he has a little vertigo problem when he walks in the woods. He is, however, anxious to go deer hunting in Texas come November.
Chapman cannot hunt at the moment as he is recovering from triple-bypass heart surgery. He had a stint seven years ago, but became alarmed when he started having chest pains a little over a month ago. After an angiogram, his doctor discovered he had blockage of 80% and 90%. He is now recovering well and hopes to go out on Squirrel Day, but might use a smaller gage gun so the recoil does not hurt him. He is also dealing with corporal tunnel, which he had off and on, but after his surgery, he developed numbness in his right hand. His doctor told him to give it six months to get better.
The other big change in his life this year occurred when he lost his wife, Alisia Moree, to ovarian cancer. They would have been married 24 years this August. Alisia came to Ville Platte as the plant manager of Holloway. They met at a Chamber of Commerce meeting in mid 1995 and married in 1996. Alisia often joined him on his hunting trips. “She loved the hill country,” he said. “We had seasonal deer leases in Texas and had a tradition: Christmas Day we’d leave and come back before New Year’s, and we’d take the family. It was a good time.”
Chapman has three children: Meghann, Alexis, and Korey. Both of his daughters have killed deer in Texas, and he and his son recently went teal hunting. Chapman proudly showed off pictures of his children with their kills. One picture is from Miller’s Lake where he recalled going there at about 11:00 a.m., and within an hour-and-a-half, he had killed four greenheads. Another picture is from a turkey hunt where he and his wife stayed at a ranch. Three turkeys came to his calling that time. He shot and dropped two with one shot.
Not far from the mounted turkey in Chapman’s office is the head of an aoudad sheep, native to northern Africa, but they have been populated in Texas where they are accustomed to rocky terrain. Chapman pointed to a mallard on the wall and told the story of the Ice Walk Hunt from just after Christmas in 1989 “It was the coldest it had ever got in Ville Platte, at single digits. Miller’s Lake had froze four inches solid. People couldn’t get out of their boat houses because the boats were frozen in. We got permission to launch our boat at someone’s camp. We put it on top of the ice. We had waiters. We walked on the ice until we found a blind and we tried to bust a hole open, but it was too thick. We kept walking and we could see where some ducks were landing. There were some areas where there was still water. The ducks were landing there and swimming around. We got in a blind and had a good hunt.” He said the whole scene with the ducks and the frozen lake was beautiful.
Chapman recalled his son’s first deer kill was when Chapman kneeled down, and Korey put his gun on his dad’s shoulder as the deer were walking by. He had asked Korey how he felt after his first kill. Korey said, “I’m sad it’s dead, but I’m glad I made a good shot.” Chapman added, “That’s exactly how you’re supposed to feel. And I strongly believe in eating or giving to someone to eat what I kill. The whole thing about it is to provide some kind of food. The recreation is tremendous, but my wife and I really believe you eat what you kill.”
Hunting has been an important part of Chapman’s life. “Going through high school I had some rough times,” he said. “Like sports carry some kids through rough times, hunting has helped carry me through rough times.” While this year has indeed been a rough one for Chapman, his love of hunting and the bonding with his family will continue to carry him through.