sloped back so abruptly that he could hardly be said to have a
forehead at all; his chin slanted off right into nothing. His eyes were
small and round with shallow, glazed, pale-yellow pupils, and they were
set wide apart in his head and they were unwinking and staring, like a
fish's eyes. His nose was no more than a pair of tiny slits in the
middle of the yellow mask. His mouth was the worst of all. It was the
awful mouth of a catfish, lipless and almost inconceivably wide,
stretching from side to side. Also when Fishhead became a man grown his
likeness to a fish increased, for the hair upon his face grew out into
two tightly kinked, slender pendants that drooped down either side of
the mouth like the beards of a fish.

If he had any other name than Fishhead, none excepting he knew it. As
Fishhead he was known and as Fishhead he answered. Because he knew the
waters and the woods of Reelfoot better than any other man there, he was
valued as a guide by the city men who came every year to hunt or fish;
but there were few such jobs that Fishhead would take. Mainly he kept
to himself, tending his corn patch, netting the lake, trapping a little
and in season pot hunting for the city markets. His neighbors,
ague-bitten whites and malaria-proof negroes alike, left him to himself.
Indeed for the most part they had a superstitious fear of him. So he
lived alone, with no kith nor kin, nor even a friend, shunning his kind
and shunned by them.

His cabin stood just below the state line, where Mud Slough runs into
the lake. It was a shack of logs, the only human habitation for four
miles up or down. Behind it the thick timber came shouldering right up
to the edge of Fishhead's small truck patch, enclosing it in thick shade
except when the sun stood just overhead. He cooked his food in a
primitive fashion, outdoors, over a hole in the soggy earth or upon the
rusted red ruin of an old cook stove, and he drank the saffron water of
the lake out of a dipper made of a gourd, faring and fending for
himself, a master hand at skiff and net, competent with duck gun and
fish spear, yet a creature of affliction and loneliness, part savage,
almost amphibious, set apart from his fellows, silent and suspicious.

In front of his cabin jutted out a long fallen cottonwood trunk, lying
half in and half out of the water, its top side burnt by the sun and
worn by the friction of Fishhead's bare feet until it showed countless
patterns of tiny scrolled