e banks.

It is a wonderful place for fish--bass and crappie and perch and the
snouted buffalo fish. How these edible sorts live to spawn and how their
spawn in turn live to spawn again is a marvel, seeing how many of the
big fish-eating cannibal fish there are in Reelfoot. Here, bigger than
anywhere else, you find the garfish, all bones and appetite and horny
plates, with a snout like an alligator, the nearest link, naturalists
say, between the animal life of today and the animal life of the
Reptilian Period. The shovel-nose cat, really a deformed kind of
freshwater sturgeon, with a great fan-shaped membranous plate jutting
out from his nose like a bowsprit, jumps all day in the quiet places
with mighty splashing sounds, as though a horse had fallen into the
water. On every stranded log the huge snapping turtles lie on sunny days
in groups of four and six, baking their shells black in the sun, with
their little snaky heads raised watchfully, ready to slip noiselessly
off at the first sound of oars grating in the row-locks.

But the biggest of them all are the catfish. These are monstrous
creatures, these catfish of Reelfoot--scaleless, slick things, with
corpsy, dead eyes and poisonous fins like javelins and long whiskers
dangling from the sides of their cavernous heads. Six and seven feet
long they grow to be and to weigh two hundred pounds or more, and they
have mouths wide enough to take in a man's foot or a man's fist and
strong enough to break any hook save the strongest and greedy enough to
eat anything, living or dead or putrid, that the horny jaws can master.
Oh, but they are wicked things, and they tell wicked tales of them down
there. They call them man-eaters and compare them, in certain of their
habits, to sharks.

Fishhead was of a piece with this setting. He fitted into it as an acorn
fits its cup. All his life he had lived on Reelfoot, always in the one
place, at the mouth of a certain slough. He had been born there, of a
negro father and a half-breed Indian mother, both of them now dead, and
the story was that before his birth his mother was frightened by one of
the big fish, so that the child came into the world most hideously
marked. Anyhow, Fishhead was a human monstrosity, the veritable
embodiment of nightmare. He had the body of a man--a short, stocky,
sinewy body--but his face was as near to being the face of a great fish
as any face could be and yet retain some trace of human aspect. His
skull