'Tipsy' Hunter Finds Way to Fight Off Crocodile

How to cope when a crocodile pulls you underwater? Just poke it in the eye, of course. That's what Australian hunter Stephen Moreen, 20, did when a 6-foot croc grabbed his arm and dragged him under in a remote area about 200 miles southwest of Darwin, Australia, the BBC reports. It helped to be "a little bit tipsy" during the struggle, he admits. Moreen says he was wading in the water to grab a goose he'd just shot when the crocodile attacked: It did "the death roll," he tells ABC Australia. "Lucky for me when [he] went underwater I saw him and poked his eye. He let go. Once he let go he ran for the bank. My cousin-brother shot him."

Moreen's sister-in-law then applied first aid, and he drank a few Carlton Dry beers to ease the pain, 9 News reports. "I wasn't too worried until I saw the scars," he says. "It made me cry. I'm fine, I'm alive. It could have been bad. It could have got my leg." Dragged in about waist deep, Moreen says the crocodile scratched up his back, ripped the flesh on his arm, and punctured it three times. When doctors and medical staff arrived to treat him, Moreen was "conveyed in a mildly intoxicated state to the clinic where his wounds were cleaned," a police official tells NT News. Moreen then drove himself to a hospital yesterday for further treatment. (Read about a woman who committed suicide by crocodile.)