Bullheaded
At least McGinnis Slough has been spared this fate. I like to think the descendants of those first bullheads of mine are swimming there now, free and unmolested.
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The bullhead is a creature to be reckoned with. Like all members of the catfish family, it comes with three vicious spines. Some people believe it’s the mouth barbels that do the damage–they’re the people most quickly injured. It’s the dorsal fin, and especially the two pectoral fins, that you must watch out for. And the smaller the bullhead, the more surely it will get you; even newly hatched bullhead fry, swimming in enormous schools so dense and dark they almost seem a single living thing, are as dangerous as a swarm of bees.
Normally the bullhead is a respectable eating fish, though it’s not in the same class as the channel catfish, whose flesh is white and flaky and delicately flavored. The channel cat is slim and generally silver gray in color, and it has a forked tail that’s very unlike the bullhead’s blunt appendage. Even skinned and dressed, the two can be easily distinguished. If you see “catfish” at the local supermarket and the meat is dark and the tail blunt, someone’s putting something over on you.
So you see, this is a pleasant activity. You sit in a lawn chair, you drink beer, you listen for the bells, and when they sound you reel in your bullhead and remove it from the hook. Bullheads of course invariably swallow the hooks. The good news is that once they do they almost never escape. The bad news is that you must somehow remove the hook with a pair of pliers. And no matter how carefully you do this, the bullhead has more than a sporting chance of spearing you with one of its fins.
