Yeah, Rob, I can run a trot line. Never caught an alligator, but I caught plenty catfish, and loved eating them. I got finned more than enough times to make me get a big pair of pliers and grab those bastards with the pliers and not my hands.

My dad had a friend who has a cabin on the east fork of the white river in Indiana. Bill adams was his name, we called him Grizzly Adams (because that was popular at the time, and because he never shaved, and he needed to. He was one big hairy old boy) Anyway, Bill had a nice new fiberglas fishing boat, and we all went out to try it out, running trot lines and bank lines- a bank line is a single drop with three treble hooks and a big heavy weight, tied to a thin piss-elm sapling on the bank. You could just motor by, see if the sapling was twitching, and know which bank line had a fish.

Well, I got to drive the boat, and Bill and his son leaned over the end and took fish off, rebaited the lines with liver or wheaties, I’d back the boat out and nose up to the next line.

Bill had found a couple snags, the river was dropping pretty rapidly and the lines got tangled up fast, so we regularly had to unhook a line from an underground snag. Anyway, one of those times, Bill slid his thumb down the line trying to find the snag, and slid it into a snapping turtle’s mouth. The snapping turtle, thinking lunch had arrived, and unhappy about the treble hook it swallowed, bit down. hard.

Bill came back into the boat with speed you don’t expect from a 40 year old guy, fliped the snapper onto the deck, in the midst of five barefooted kids. The turtle still had Bill’s thumb, and was spoiling for some toes, before bill pulled out his boat gun and shot five rounds through the turtle AND THE BOTTOM OF THE BOAT.

I hurried back to the dock where we quickly swam under the boat with sink putty to cover the holes, Bill went up on shore blleding like a pig, dad used a circular saw to cut the turtle in half and get Bill’s thumb out, and everyone drove off to the hospital.

Later that same night, nursing Jim Beam and smoking cheap cigars, Bill showed us how to cook turtle meat and how many onions to put in hushppies. His thumb doesn’t quite point in the direction it’s supposed to, but it mostly works fine.

And I learned some important things about trot lines.