"Carp Man Dan" Giegerich, my carp fishing partner, is mentioned in "Fishing for Buffalo and other Rough Fish, by Dickson and Buffler." The first American to become a member of an English Carp fishing club (Carp is the favorite sport fish in England), Dan believes Carp fishing to be the most artistic kind of fishing. Not that it has anything to do with fishing, but the Carp Man, who's in his mid-twenties, looks so much like a famous movie star his vanity plate is TRVLTA.

I picked up Dan at his home in St. Louis, Missouri, and we spent an hour or so driving to Illinois and our fishing location at Cottonwood Lakes. It was April and cold enough for a heavy jacket. Dan accurately described the weather as "raining and not not-raining". He wore long underwear to ward off the chill. We talked about fishing and all the stuff people talk about while they're getting comfortable with each other.

During the drive, I learned that his father used to take Dan fishing during his growing-up years. Dan now takes his fiancée, Gina, and though she thinks Dan is overly obsessed with the sport, she enjoys it. Dan's mother some­times goes with them, more to get out in the countryside than to fish. Dan's sheltie goes along, too, running around in circles and barking with joy whenever a fish is on the line.

Dan, who's employed as a package handler for a delivery service, wants to get into fishing as his line of work because, he says, "If your line of work isn't what you love, you're in misery the rest of your life." Just before Dan's father died l4 years ago at age 53, he whispered to his son, "Carp fishing is the best. You have a better chance of consistently catching big ones."

The area called Cottonwood Lakes was once flat land, with layers of coal just beneath the surface. It's now a series of fee-fishing ponds, dirt mounds and, you guessed it, cottonwood trees. Every tree has at least one bobber tangled in it, hanging just out of reach. The six ponds on the property are stocked with different combinations of fish. One has Trout; one has Channel Cats, Sunfish and Bluegill; one has only Channel Cats; one has Largemouth Bass; and another has Largemouth Bass, Sunfish and Bluegill. We chose the sixth, a one-acre pond stocked with Carp, Channel Cats and Flathead Catfish, some of which weighed as much as 50 pounds.

We paid the six-dollar fee and set up on the bank, which was mostly clay with flakes of coal. The walls of the pond probably were clay, too, giving the water a beige-green color. It was a major ordeal getting the poles hooked up and the lines baited and thrown out. Dan joked about whether he was going to be set up to fish before it was time to go home.

Dan's hooks, handmade in England just for Carp fishing, are called hair-rig hooks. Dangling from each hook is a fiber thread that holds the bait. The hair-rig hook is designed so that when the Carp bites the bait, it can't feel the hook and when it sucks in the bait, the hook follows. Dan has one rod 11 feet long and another 12 feet long and all the necessary Carp fishing equipment and probably some unnecessary equipment, none of which matches any of the tackle in my tackle box.

The Carp fisher has lots of choices for bait, including corn, chick peas, dough balls, Jell-O powder balls, artificial flies, lures, boiled potatoes, bread, worms, a concoction of corn meal with banana pudding and even popcorn. We used chick peas and dough balls made from Wheaties, molasses and Cidex, a German sweetener.

Besides us, three groups of people were fishing in our pond. To our right was a guy quietly and successfully fishing for Carp. To our left were two guys fishing for whatever they could get while drinking as much beer as they could drink. Directly across from us was a family. The mother sat in the van all day, while the elementary-age kids, a boy and a girl, dabbled in fishing when they weren't doing kid-type things. The father fished all day and caught several Catfish and some Carp. Every time he got a fish on the line, his kids gathered around and cheered as he reeled it in. Once we heard him holler when a fish pulled his rod into the water. It appeared to be lost forever, but a little later we heard him yell again as he snagged and retrieved it.

At one point, I went across to help the kids cheer their father on as he brought in a nice Catfish. In doing so, I passed by the two beer drinkers. One was quiet and inoffensive, the other loud and obnoxious. Guess which one grabbed me by the sleeve as I passed. "Hey, you should been here last Sunday," he said.

"I was fishing in South Carolina last Sunday," I said, tugging my sleeve away from his grasp.

"You were? Well, last Sunday I caught me a Catfish over there, across the pond. See that tree with all the bobbers hanging off it?"

"You mean the one that looks like it's decorated for Christmas?"

"Yeah. I was fishing over here and caught me three little Catfish, and then I walked over to the other side, by that tree, and hooked onto a Catfish that I know went over 10 pounds. I got him up to the bank, but I didn't have my net, so he took off and popped the line. Where are you from?"

"Minnesota."

"That so? Why do you come here when you could be up there catching Northern Pike?"

"I'm fishing all 50 states, going for a different fish in every state and fishing with a different person in every state. I'm writing a book about it."

"That's where my aunt lives. You gotta go to Iowa for Catfish."

"I'm fishing for Bullheads in Iowa."

"Bullheads! No! Channel Cats! Iowa's got Channel Cats, not Bullheads."

I told him that I had checked it out with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and learned that 80 percent of the fishing in Iowa is for Bullheads.

"You should go talk to my uncle," the drunk insisted. "He'll tell you its Channel Cats. He's a big man in Iowa. Lives in Dayton. You know where Fort Dodge is?"

"Yes."

"Dayton is between Des Moines and Fort Dodge. My uncle is the guy to take you fishing in Iowa."

"I'm going fishing with a game warden there."

Now this guy looked to be close to 30 years old, but he said to me, "When I grow up, I want to be a game warden." He told me his father had been an avid fisherman. "My dad fished from Tennessee down through Arkan­sas," he said. "That's all he did. He was disabled."

I started to go, but he pulled at my sleeve again and said, "It's nice to meet someone like you. I never met someone who writes books. So where are you from? Nebraska?"

"North of St. Paul, Minnesota, but I'm originally from Michigan."

"My father was originally from Michigan."

"What town?"

"I don't remember." There was a great pause, and then it came, "Dee-Troit!"

As I once again moved to leave, he said, "I wish I could catch me a Catfish so I could get in your book."

"You'd have to catch a Carp," I pointed out.

"I'm fishing for Catfish today," he replied.

I finally managed to get away, but not until I'd promised to photograph his forthcoming Catfish. As I left, he called after me, "If you guys want big Carp, I don't know that you're using the right bait. I'd go out and get a can of corn."

Back with Dan, I told him, "Some people don't listen, they only talk." Having heard the whole conversation, he laughed and agreed.

I tried to take a nap on the seat of my pickup truck, but there was a commotion and I climbed out to go photo­graph the Catfish the obnoxious drunk had just caught. When I got there, he refused to let me photograph it because, at two pounds, he considered it too small to rate a place in my book.

The fishing wasn't going well for Dan and me. The Carp Man even started talking about going in after the fish. What made it even harder to deal with was the fact that fish were jumping and swirling on the top of the water. Our lack of success didn't go unnoticed by the obnoxious beer drinker. He started ragging on us.

"What are you using for bait?"

"Chick-peas."

"What are they? You need to use corn."

"This stuff is corn."

"You need to use corn."

"This is corn. It's white corn."

"You need to use yellow corn."

At this point, I was having two conversations, the one with him and the one with myself that I felt like having with him. It was at this point that I realized the importance of fishing. It's not just fun, it's another issue over which man can fight wars. It's as important as control of the salt trade routes was and control of the oil trade routes is. It's big time.

Halfway through the day, Dan rigged up his 12 footer with two-pound test line and with the prediction, "This will do it." He put the line in the water alongside our other lines. Apparently, Carp are really sensitive to the feel of the fishing line because Dan had a fish on the line almost immediately. He waited to set the hook much longer than I could have, but it didn't matter because the line broke after a couple of minutes. As soon as Dan's line got a re-bait and was back in the water, wham, bam, another fish. With two-pound test line, Dan was in for a long, drawn-out fight, letting the fish run, reeling the fish in, letting the fish run, reeling it in.

At least, that's what would have happened if Dan's line hadn't gotten tangled with the line of the more pleasant beer drinker, who let his go slack so it wouldn't interfere. Next, the fish went to our right, tangling up with that fisher's line, and he, too, let his line go with the flow. The obnoxious drunk started laughing and yelling, "Some­body bring him in! Somebody bring him in!" That's when the fish went to the left once again to involve the drunk, who convinced himself that he, too, had a fish on the line, one that was bigger and better than the one on everyone else's line.

Since he didn't have to worry about breaking his 10-pound test line, the drunk started a fast retrieval. When he lost his fish, it was at the exact moment that everyone lost his fish. Everyone got his line back with hook intact except Dan, whose line had been broken. The drunk yelled, "I had him!" Someone else yelled, "Everybody had him." The drunk never backed down on his story. His last statement on the subject was, "It was my fish, only on a different hook."

Dan's only comment was, "Well, Larry, at least you got something to write about."

The drunk's embarrassed buddy suddenly felt a need to go home. The wife of the guy on our right arrived, and the drunk, not wanting to fish alone, suddenly recalled that this guy was an old fishing buddy. After making the brilliant comment, "I recognize your wife!" he joined them. As he walked by us, he said, "You need to use yellow corn."

As we were packing up to leave, the drunk wandered over. We argued about whether there were Catfish in Nebraska. When I pointed out that it's the official state fish, he told me, "That may be, but there still aren't any Catfish there."

He told me a good story, though: "My father once had a Striped Bass on his line that was so big it almost broke his pole. He couldn't hold it, so he let the line go slack. Kicking off his boots, he dove in and followed the line down until he got to an old car. The fish was just inside the car body." I asked what his dad did next. "Well," he said, "there wasn't anything he could do 'cause the fish rolled up the windows and locked the doors."

Before we left, the drunk hooked a fish that took 20 minutes to land. He seemed to go into a trance as he worked it to shore. He kept mumbling that it was the biggest Catfish he'd ever caught. When he realized he had a Carp, not a Catfish, he didn't know what to do with it. It never dawned on him that he could release it. He said his wife was going to be mad when he got home because he had spent over 20 bucks on his fishing trip and he only had two pounds of Catfish to show for it. As far as he was concerned, the Carp didn't count.

Dan is into catch and release and so is one of his friends, who once was having a real good day catching lots of Carp and releasing them when a lady came up to him and said, "Oh, you're gonna get in trouble. You're gonna get arrested for releasing fish. They're gonna come and arrest you." Not everybody fishes for fun.

The next day, I went with Dan and his fiancée to a place just south of Waterloo, Illinois, called Trappers, a fee-fishing operation owned by Liz and Gene Esker. It was the weekend of the Esker's first Carp fishing tournament of the year, and we were their guests. We arrived on the second day of the tournament.

On the first day of the tournament, 24 Carp had been caught in one of their two ponds.

One pond contains mostly Carp and Catfish, the other mostly Bass and Paddlefish. Paddlefish supposedly are plankton eaters, so it was a surprise to learn that some of the fee fishers have caught them using minnows and stink bait.

The main building at Trappers is a log structure. This is where you pay the fishing fee, where Liz makes home­made lunches and where Gene cleans fish. A creek flows through a pipe to a fish-holding tank inside the building and then exits, passing by an ornamental paddle wheel. Outside, the creek continues along the driveway, passing three pens of farm fox and a cage holding a raccoon before emptying into one of the fishing ponds.

I spent less time fishing than I should have at Trappers because I found Gene so interesting. He liked to talk as he cleaned fish, and I liked to listen. I asked him about the farm fox I'd seen outside. "A cross between a coyote and a dog is called a coy dog," he said, "and a cross between a dog and a fox is called a farm fox. They don't make good pets because they bite." I asked him what they eat, and he said, "Fingers! And fish and dog food."

Gene told me about his business as he put Buffalo fillets through a cube-steak tenderizer, scoring the fillets and cutting the bones into quarter-inch bits so they could be eaten unnoticed. Bypassing wholesalers, he has developed his own market of restaurants, taverns and churches for Buffalo, Catfish, Carp and Drum. (He calls drum stone perch because of the stones in their heads, which they use to make drumming sounds during the mating season.) He sells some of the fish live, but most of his buyers want the fish cleaned.

At an age when most boys are reading about Huck Finn living on the Mississippi, Gene was out working the big river, walking the overflow beds, trapping snapping turtles and making good money by selling them to local connoisseurs. Once, when he was eight years old, he was hunting turtles and it got too dark to continue. He found a shed, crawled in and went to sleep. The next thing he remembers is roosters crowing and his uncle looking in the door and yelling, "Here he is!" Gene says he never gave a thought to anyone worrying about him. (For the record, he hasn't trapped turtles since it became illegal.)

I'd describe Gene as an opportunist-survivor who, after doing his 20 years in the military service to get a full pension, now takes advantage of all the opportunities available to him. He's put most of his land in a conservation program that he believes is environmentally sound, collecting money from the federal government for doing so. He uses available state money to build ponds, he stocks his ponds and charges people to fish in them, he collects the valuable ginseng root for shipment to the Orient, he traps and he buys and sells furs. I'd say that if there's any way to make a living off the land, whether it be easy money or hard work, Gene does it.

Every year, Liz and Gene host a family reunion that's gotten so big many people who attend aren't even family, just friends and friends of friends. The high point of the day is a fishing contest in which the contestants plunge into a pond and, wading or swimming for 10 minutes, attempt to catch fish using only their hands. Some manage to catch catfish weighing 40, 50 and even 60 pounds. Everyone joins in, even little kids. Older folks and those who aren't doers sit around and cheer the fish grabbers on.

The pond contains Blue, Channel Cats and Willow (a local name for the male Channel Catfish, whose dark color and swollen heads make them look pretty different) as well as Mirror and Grass Carp. "Grass Carp are like torpedoes in the water," Gene told me. "They come flying out of the water, jumping about four feet above the surface, at 30 to 40 miles an hour. They sometimes land on the bank where the older people are sitting. This gives them an opportunity to stop cheering and start screaming."

Gene came up with this idea because, he says, it was something he would have loved to do when he was a boy. It sounded dangerous to me, but Gene told me he clips the spines off the catfish before putting them in the ponds.

Despite my conversations with Gene, I managed to put in a fairly full day fishing for Carp with Dan and Gina. None of us had much luck. Dan caught one small Carp, while the fishers on the other side of the pond, who were using and chumming with yellow corn, were hauling in big ones.

I'd been on the road for more than three weeks and had 13 hours of driving to do, so I begged out of my fishing contract about three hours early and headed for home. A week later, I got a letter from the Carp Man in which he told me that right after I'd left, he'd caught a Carp weighing three and a half pounds and Gina had hooked a nice one "that got away." The big news in the letter made me wish I'd stayed longer. Dan wrote, "A guy across the pond hooked a fish that came totally out of the water, giving rise to estimates of up to 15 pounds." But it got away, so who knows?

I kept thinking about all those fish in the ponds at Trappers until one day I put in a call to Gene and talked him into signing a fishing contract. I asked him to take me on one of his semi-weekly jaunts to service the 42 fishing nets he's got on the Mississippi River almost year 'round. I needed to know more about where those fish came from, and I wanted to learn more about Gene.

Two months later, in June, I was back in Illinois and on the big river with Gene and his friend Eric. The river was at high-water stage as we set out to check Gene's nets.

A passing barge reminded Gene of an experience he had had several years earlier: He was on his boat, riding downriver, when a set of barges went by; creating a large wake that sank the boat. Gene had removed the flotation devices to get more room, so when the boat sank; it sank, leaving no trace. Fortunately, he was able to swim to shore. Gene bought a new boat, an oversized aluminum john boat. It, I might add, has flotation devices at both ends.

The Mississippi River is dangerous. We put in near a grain silo where, the previous week, a man had fallen off a barge as he was filling it. He plunged about 10 feet underwater, got swept beneath the barge and came up uncon­scious downriver, where somebody spotted him and pulled him out. He was fine after a little mouth-to-mouth, but not all river stories have such a happy ending.

Other than the boat, the net is Gene's key tool. Generally, the net is 10 by l8 feet. It has several circular nets sewn inside, so the fish have to figure out how to get out of more than one compartment to escape. The net is tied to a rope, which is tied to an anchor, which is dropped into water about five to 20 feet deep. The net sits on the bottom with the opening facing downstream because fish swim against, not with, the current.

A unique marker designed by Gene is placed on the shore so that he can find the net but other people can't. Beavers sometimes destroy these markers. They chew through the nets, too. Gene spends a lot of time sewing the nets on the spot, but the damage is sometimes so bad he has to take the net home for repair.

Gene also fishes with trammel nets, though he didn't have any set out the day I was there. Trammel nets are stretched across the river in water as deep as 50 feet. The law says that trammel nets can't be dragged, only floated.

Riding around in the john boat, we kept an eye out for Gene's markers. When we found one, we threw a rope-weighted hook into the water, drawing the rope toward the boat until the hook snagged the net or the net's anchor rope. Lifting the net into the boat, we took the fish out and put it in the boat's live well. We caught Willow Cat, Blue Cat, Channel cat, Flathead cat, three kinds of Buffalo (Roach Back, Plug and Rotor), Drum, Sturgeon and Shad, releasing the last two. Drum was what we caught the most, but because they weren't on our wish list for the day, we tossed them back, too. We caught so many Drum that Eric called it "a humdrum day."

Gene also gets Paddlefish, or Spoonbill, which sometimes get tangled in the nets and die. He also catches game fish that he has to release, such as Largemouth Bass, Smallmouth Bass, White Bass, Striped Bass, hybrid, Walleye and Sauger. He's caught Israeli Carp and once brought home what he calls a Goldfish Carp. A beautiful black and red fish, the Goldfish Carp weighed three pounds but didn't survive its overnight stay in Gene's holding tank.

It bothered me that the nets often contained dead soft-shell turtles. In summer, the turtles can live only about 10 hours without going up for air. In winter, they can stay under for months.

Lunch, served from a brown paper bag while we were pulled up next to shore, was the only relaxing time we spent on the river. While we ate, we watched some Gar feeding and playing on the surface and we had a good view of an island rookery, home to several hundred Blue Herons. Gene told me that the Bald Eagle population seems to be increasing, a good sign for the environment. "Five years ago," he said, "I'd see groups of five or six coming through in February. Now I'll see as many as 20."

He also told me about an unsolved river mystery. The story dates from a few years ago, when he and two help­ers were out on the river, eating lunch and lamenting the fact that they'd forgotten to bring the soda. (It's called soda in Illinois, pop in Minnesota and soda pop in other places.) As they threw the next net out, Gene said, "I sure wish I had a soda." When they retrieved it, the net held a brand-new, fresh-off-the-barge six pack of cold Pepsi.

During our lunch break, Gene said to me, "You sure take a lot of pictures." I snapped back, "You sure have a lot of nets."

Gene took off and made a run through a channel filled with floating trees. Eric, sitting up front, called them off, and Gene bounced the boat over them, lifting the outboard out of the water to save the prop.

Out of the channel, we passed under a series of bluffs, continuing our rounds of the nets. Gene told me that the hills along the Mississippi are riddled with sinkholes, which are caves that have filled with water over time. "Back when I was a kid," he said, "there were a lot of commercial fishermen on the river, and they stocked the sinkholes. These sinkholes are now full of fish. But nobody knows it, so nobody fishes them."

We had started our day in an upbeat mood, but we became rather gloomy as it drew to a close. We should have caught half a ton of fish, but we were holding only about 130 pounds. When I optimistically predicted that the last net would bring a marine bonanza, Gene said, "No, that net never catches many fish. The location isn't a good one historically." The two Flathead Catfish in the last net weighed about 35 pounds each, bringing the total catch of the day to roughly 200 pounds.

As we headed home, Gene told me, "You can mark this down as the worst fishing day ever. And the next worst was the one before this."