THE SUNFISH 



By John L. Leary 



Slowly upward, wavering, gleaming, 



Rose the Ugudwash, the sunfish. 



Seized the line of Hiawatha, 



Swung with all his weight upon it. 

 ******* 



But when Hiawatha saw him 



Slowly rising through the water, 



Lifting up his disk refulgent. 



Loud he shouted in derision 



Esa 1 esa ! shame upon you ! 



You are Ugudwash, the sunfish, 



You are not the fish I wanted. 



You are not the King of Fishes. 



— Longfellow. 



Hiawatha was wrong in his estimate of the courage of 

 the sunfish, for taking size into consideration it is a gamy, 

 tenacious, and vigorous fighter, and, in my estimation, the 

 gamest of all our fresh-water fishes, as every boy will 

 assert and the older sportsmen certify to. In looking back- 

 ward through the long vista of years, I can recall the 

 fishing of my boyhood days in the lakes and ponds of eastern 

 North Carolina; especially do I remember a chain of ponds 

 on the sand dunes of Nags Head, laying between Roanoke 

 Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. These ponds teemed with 

 this gamy little fish, and as memory carries me back to the 

 youthful sport of bathing and catching sunnies, it makes a 

 page in a man's history pleasant to dream over, a period of 

 life never to be forgot. 



I feel that the propagation of this beautiful and economic 

 little fish has been very much neglected. This in part, no 

 doubt, has been due to the fact of its great fecundity, for it 

 is one of the most prolific as well as most widely distributed 

 of all our fresh-water fishes. It is one of the basses, not 

 quite as aristocratic as some of its big kinsmen, yet the 

 little yellow bellies are known in many localities as sun 



