Something was going on down by the dock.  For the last several days the guys from the Department of Conversation had been out shocking fish, and now they were standing by their boat in a way that made me want to see what they had in it.  Shocking fish is one of the things you do when you work for the D.O.C.  They have this generator aboard, and an outfit that looks like an oversize rake with dangling foil strips that they take out to a likely spot, lower into the water, and turn on the juice.  ZAP!  Whatever was swimming below is now on the surface, stunned.  This way the D.O.C. can gather up fish, count them, weigh them, and keep whatever really impresses them in a live well for some later use they could probably explain better than I.  They get paid to do this. 

 But they'd been at it for more than a week now, and most folks thought this was about long enough.  There was a perfectly good fish cleaning table on the dock not getting much use thanks to the fifteen inch limit  and the D.O.C. hanging around.  Keep on cleaning bass in the bathroom sink, sooner or later you're going to get kicked out of your motel.

 There were two of these D.O.C. guys, one young and the other the boss.  From them I had learned there were plenty of fifteen inch bass in this lake, some even larger.  All you needed was an electric fish shocker to get them.  I stepped up close and had a look at what they were talking about.

 The state of Missouri had provided these guys with a mighty fine boat.  An eighteen footer, I'd say, heavy and stable with a large Mercury outboard motor and thousands of dollars of equipment aboard.  I always did like those Mercury outboards, the ones painted black.  But right away I saw there was something wrong here.  The boat was, as they say in nautical terms, awash, water right up to the rails.  Sunk might be a better word, except you can't totally sink these modern boats with their built in floatation.  Otherwise this one would have been on the bottom.

 "What happened?"  I asked the D.O.C. guy.

 "That fish did it."

 He seemed surprisingly calm, considering several thousand dollars worth of the state's equipment was presently under water.

 "Catfish.  See him?"

 Sure enough, something was swimming around the generator and other ruined fish shocking stuff.

 "That's an old flathead,"  the D.O.C. guy said with a touch of pride.  "He'll go sixty pounds, I bet."

 A flathead cat, in case you didn't know, is the largest of the fresh water catfish native to United States.   Mark Twain writes about them in Huckleberry Finn.  My favorite part of this great book is where Huck and Jim pull in an eighty pounder with just enough nonchalance to remind us that there once was a time when such a things were not altogether uncommon.  Until now, the only one I had ever seen alive was in the Shedd Aquarium where I used to go as a kid.  That catfish at the Aquarium was large enough to swallow a small dog, and I never missed a chance to admire it.  In my trot line days on the Rock River I always made a point to bait up a couple of big hooks with a full size bluegill or maybe half a carp; it's like the lottery, you don't play, you can't win.  Sometimes these hooks would turn up straightened out the next morning, and I would always pretend a flathead had done it and not, as was more likely,  a snapping turtle. 

 "Sunk the boat,"  the D.O.C. guy repeated.  He didn't seem at all concerned with explaining this mess to his bosses.  He was probably pretty tight with them.  How else would he have gotten a job like this in the first place?  He wasn't entirely clear as to how the fish had sunk the boat.  My guess is that it had somehow fought its way out of the livewell and knocked loose that little plug in the back.  I never did trust those plugs, and for just that reason. 

  Let me try to describe a flathead catfish.  Except for the size thing, it looks a lot like a bullhead, one of those yellow ones that always swallows the hook.  Bullheads are kind of poor cousins to real catfish, nothing much to get excited about until you dip them in corn meal and fry them.  I have a friend  who insists on calling bullheads catfish and I keep saying no, no, no, there is a difference, but most people don't want to know about that.  To be honest, most people don't even want to look closely at a catfish of any kind. You might say they are under the impression that catfish are ugly.  And it's true all catfish have large horny mouths that more or less extend from ear to ear, and it's also true that they all have whiskers, and it's certainly true that they make it through life without so much as growing a single scale which makes them slippery to hold, some might even say slimy, and yes, all catfish, from infancy on up, do come equipped with three spike tipped fins they will gladly ram into you causing any amount of pain, and yes, yes, they do indeed come in such unappealing colors as mud brown, slate gray, and vomit yellow, and yes, yes, yes, (I too grow impatient) it is only  fair to mention their eyes although I can't right now think of anything reasonable to compare them with, so let's just say looking a catfish in the eye is a rather odd experience and let it go at that.  But, having let it go at that, I still insist people are wrong when they say a catfish is ugly.

   No fish is ugly.  Fish are like airplanes.  No airplane is or could be ugly, not even a Fokker or a Stuka or one of those Junkers with their ugly names and evil genealogy, not even the Stealth Bomber if it bankrupt the nation, not even the Goodyear Blimp.  Flight is beauty--ugly cannot fly.  The same with fish for if water were air, what is it fish do if not fly?  Stand outside an aquarium, watch through the glass, see the universal grace and beauty of these creatures.  Even dead fish are beautiful, although somewhat less so after the birds have come along to pick out their eyes. 

 Of course, as a swimmer, the catfish is no ballerina. Be it bullhead or flathead, your catfish is designed to scour around in the muddy river bottom looking for loathsome things to eat and that is what it does best.   We must take all creatures on their own terms if we are to admire them. 

 Right now the big flathead was scouring around in the bottom of the D.O.C.s boat, seeking a way out.  Being a  proper catfish, it seemed to think the way was down rather than up and over the side--one good flop  would have done it.  It was less than relentless, almost patient, almost content.  Every now and then it would run into some expensive piece of electronic gear and give it an extra bash, as if to say "so there!" but there was no ill will in this.

 "How much do you think that guy will weigh?"  I asked the D.O.C. guy.

 "Oh, forty, fifty pounds."

 Lord, to catch such a thing.  How would you cook it?  In steaks?  Baked whole?  
Would it even be right to eat such a creature?

 The D.O.C. guy had other plans.  "We had one like that up till last year."

 "Alive?"

 "Until it died."

 I waited for the rest of the story.

 "We showed it at state fairs."

 I imagined the D.O.C. man at the state fair, the enormous tank, small boys with freckles and open mouths asking questions:

 "Mister?  What do you feed it?"

 "What did you catch it on?"

 "How long did he fight?"

 A fish like that would give small boys something to think about.

 "We had it for several years,"  the D.O.C. man said.  "Then it died."

 No one knows why fish die.  There comes a time when they roll over, belly up.  Lord knows, we all do.  It must have been a pretty ugly sight, coming to work in the morning and finding something like that floating in your tank.

 "I been looking for one to take his place.  Now I've got one"  the D.O.C. man said.  He sounded content.  So what if the generator was drowned, if the depth finder was filled with water, so what if all the fancy electronic gear was ruined forever. Stuff like that you can buy in stores.  A fish like this.  Well. 

 The D.O.C. man was in no hurry to do anything about the fish or the boat or anything else.  That's the way people are in  Missouri.  He and his partner stood there watching that fish and I stood there watching them until finally I knew it was time to head out and see if I could catch something for myself.  "Well, you got a good story to tell when you take this fish to the state fair,"  I said.  The D.O.C. guy agreed with that, but I'm not sure if he meant to tell it.

 But it was a good story and I told it to a guy in the bait shop later and right away he told me a story of his own.  One of his customers, an old man, had caught one even larger on a twelve pound test line, just hooked it in the middle of the river and let it pull the boat around until it tired and drifted up.   That was a good story too, but I don't trust it.  You can't always believe what you hear in a bait shop. 

 But you can believe what you see at the dock.  I took one last look at that catfish.  Then I got into my boat and set for another skunking on Tablerock Lake.  When I got back the D.O.C. and their boat were gone.  By evening folks were cleaning bass on the dock again.