When it comes, he hooks his thumbs into the attacker's mouth or thrusts an arm down its throat and waits for the thrashing to stop. Wading along the shore or diving to the lake bottom, he reaches into likely nooks and crevices, wiggling his fingers and waiting for a nip. That's when the hand-grabber is most likely to find his quarry. Then for days he hovers over his glutinous brood, waiting for the first fingerlings to emerge, pouncing on any intruders. Once the eggs are laid, the male chases the female off with a snap of his jaws. Late in the spring, when the chill comes off a river, catfish look for places to spawn: hollow banks, submerged timbers, the rusted wrecks of teenage misadventure - anything calm and shadowy will do. Barehanded, they meet the monster in its lair. But a few old-timers and thrill-seekers prefer to dispense with equipment altogether. People spear them with pitchforks or snag them with hooks spooled in by lawn-mower engines some use boron rods with titanium guides, ultrasonic lures, and bait spiked with amino acids that seize control of the fish's brain. If anything, they are swelling back to mythic proportions: in the 1990s alone more than forty-five state records have been set for catfish (including one for a 111-pound blue cat), though none has equaled the one in Twain's story. Whereas sturgeon and alligator gar - their only rivals for size among American fish - have been driven from their dominions, catfish still prowl thousands of rivers and streams. But unlike most bugbears, giant catfish truly exist. They were the stuff of nightmares then - the troll under the bridge, the thing at the bottom of the well. Where a little boy had been playing, only a few bubbles were left. "If Marquette's fish was the fellow to that one," he wrote in Life on the Mississippi, "he had a fair right to think the river's roaring demon was come." When pioneer mothers did their wash by a stream, another story goes, they sometimes heard a splash and a muffled yelp. Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet, canoeing down the Mississippi in 1673, were warned of a demon "who would engulf them in the abyss where he dwelt." Mark Twain, two centuries later, claimed to have seen one more than six feet long and weighing 250 pounds. THEY are North America's forgotten monsters: ooze-born, wall-eyed, grotesquely barbeled.
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