June, 1919 
FOREST AND STREAI^I 
279 
He is not constantly making his pres- 
ence known after the manner of some 
other fish. He is rarely seen and avoids 
the shallows. In the main, he follows 
up the deep channels, always close to 
the bottom, and is the first of all fish 
to go back to the river when the waters 
come to a stand before they fall. 
Not so the ubiquitous carp and royal 
buffalo. They throw up their tails and 
bore into the earth, making ringed pat- 
terns on the water, and push and hunt 
through the weeds like hounds working 
out a trail. Backs, tails and fins are 
constantly being exposed where the 
water is shallow; the submerged corn- 
fields are full of them. The crappie, 
too, come out in goodly numbers, but are 
not seen as are the carp and buffalo. 
Eels and shovel-billed cat add to the in- 
terest and variety of the catch when 
the waters subside. All the suckers are 
there, red horses, quillbacks and shin- 
ers, as well as the stately white perch 
or drum. 
It is a curious thing that bullheads 
are hardly ever taken, for they are 
found in almost every pond-hole after 
the waters have receded, but even in 
nets where eels are caught (which 
means that all fish are caught) it is 
seldom that a bullhead is seen. Little 
channel cats are caught by the barrel. 
It would seem that the bullhead must 
stay pretty close to home and not rove 
around much. After the ponds dry up 
each year, thousands of bullheads per- 
ish, along with other fish, but the next 
year will see a new supply, apparently 
as numerous as before. 
I T is a liberal education to be in, and 
go about, the river towns, such as St. 
Louis, Cairo, Memphis and Vicksburg 
when the Big River is booming. There 
is a psychology, an atmosphere, that re- 
sembles nothing else in the world. It is 
felt, being hardly susceptable of analysis. 
It is unlike war, unlike a great fire, un- 
like a political convention, unlike even 
a motor-boat show, although there are 
plenty of chug-chug boats in evidence. 
All about the city is inundation. Trains 
creep in slowly over partially submerged 
tracks, houses leave their foundations 
and float about. The steamboats out on 
the river blow to each other sonorously. 
Chimneys belch black smoke from soft 
coal; the women’s wash flies white ban- 
ners from the back porches, defying the 
soot and grime. The effects of the re- 
fugees are piled about on the wharves 
and public squares. Men pile sandbags 
where they think they will do the most 
good. Great truck loads of boxes and 
bales thunder down to the docks over the 
rough stone pavement. The river piles 
up masses of ffoth against the piling 
and drifts. Blue bottle flies hum and 
buzz about. Rainbow-colored spiders race 
over the water. And the river runs 
swiftly and silently by. 
However, it is not on the river front 
with all its busy commercial life that 
our chief interest centers, but in the 
back bayous and little coves of low 
ground among the submerged trees where 
the shanty boat town lies. If you would 
see the real inwardness of river life go 
there and move about and mingle with 
the denizens thereof. If you go plainly 
dressed and have some apparently good, 
legitimate excuse you will not be unduly 
conspicuous and things will move along 
in a natural way. 
If you have a letter of introduction to 
some one it will do much to smooth the 
way, for the shantyboat fisherman is a 
suspicious person, not always wholly 
without cause. If you want him to take 
you to his heart, and open up his soul, 
and confide to you some of the secrets 
of his trade, you must first get the im- 
pression into his mind that you are not 
a revenue officer or a fish warden. If 
you can do this indirectly, by suggestion. 
Caught in the overflow. 
so much the better. If you want to go 
fishing, and can make the proposal in 
a natural manner, he will take you along. 
Immediately one of these men takes 
you into his confidence a new world, you 
are little aware of, opens to you. You 
begin to see fact and perspective of 
what was before a most superficial pic- 
ture, meaning nothing. You begin to be, 
as it were, initiated into the fraternity 
of shantyboat fishermen, and to see 
things from the inside. You probably 
will not agree with his viewpoint in all 
respects, but you will learn much, and 
among other things, that “a man is a 
man for all that.” 
H OOP and trammel net fishing is 
familiar, no doubt to everyone; no 
fine technique, no finesse, but a 
good bit of knowledge of fish is required. 
If the net is held up by weeds or brush 
to the width of a man’s hand the most, 
if not all, the fish will escape. If it is 
held up six or eight inches for a space 
a foot long they will all certainly escape. 
So the fishermen plant forked sticks over 
the lead line, clear across. Then if the 
mesh is tight enough they catch eels. 
But there are other methods of fishing 
the overflow, which, though not so profit- 
able by any means, are more interesting 
from the viewpoint of the sportsman. 
For example, few people know of the 
custom on southern rivers of tying a 
short line to a bush and baiting it with 
a crawfish or a frog, or a large-sized 
young fish, for the big brown Mississip- 
pi cats in the woods. Cats follow the 
channels. If there is a little ditch three 
or four feet deep winding through over- 
flowed land, that is a good place to catch 
cat. A tempting shiner hung at just the 
right spot will do the trick. When a 
green bush has a 30 or 40-pound cat 
attached it makes a very animated ap- 
pearance in the green woods, threshing 
the water viciously, and making the blood 
race through the veins as the duck boat 
draws up to take the prey. 
Then, the simple joy of being out in 
a boat in the submerged land, is, in itself, 
a treat. It has a charm that grows on 
one. The consciousness of fish being all 
around you, though unseen. The pres- 
ence of animals that have climbed up on 
logs and floating debris to escape the 
water. The brilliant-hued spiders, the 
squirrels in the trees, the crows mobbing 
an owl in the depths of the wood, the 
shadows which paint pictures on the wa- 
tery canvas duplicating that above, the 
wake of fish, the eternal green coolness, 
all go to make it an experience unlike 
anything else, and supremely worth while 
for those who can have it. 
There is another way of catching cat 
in the overflow. When the river is not 
yet all over the bottom, but is only be- 
ginning to break its banks (this applies 
to a smaller river than the Mississippi), 
when the maple flats are beginning to 
inundated, the fisherman takes a trot- 
line, and instead of stretching it across 
channel, stretches it up and down along a 
willow bank bordering one of those low 
maple flats where catfish leave the river 
to go into the woods. Bait with craw- 
fish, frogs or shiners. It is an unusual 
way to fish to say the least, but it brings 
success in some measure when it would 
be useless to fish in the channel; in- 
deed lines could not be kept in the chan- 
nel at such a time on account of floating 
drift and other debris. 
Carp and buffalo can be caught with 
a long-handled dip net in the overflow 
by wading, stalking them, and picking 
them up. To stalk the wake of a fish 
and pick him up with a dip net is not 
so easy as it sounds. 
B ut the joy of being out in a boat in 
the overflow is the supreme reward. 
The companionship of a man who 
knows the country, the green woods 
with birds in the trees above the water, 
the fairyland of reflections, the odd zo- 
ological specimens in the form of bugs 
and spiders, and the fish consciousness 
that you will soon develop. The great, 
gnarled trees, draped in mammoth vines, 
stand in the submerged forest; and the 
beautiful summer weather, with great 
banks of yellow-white clouds. All these 
tend to make floating around in a boat 
in the overflow anything but common- 
place and he who visits the Mississippi 
in flood time, will carry away with him 
memories of scenes that will be as unique 
as any he will experience in many a 
journey to places that are much farther 
removed from the ordinary walks of man. 
