Nobody plans a trip to the Atchafalaya Basin to catch a bowfin. You go in for bass, or for sac a lait, and you idle a flat bottom boat down a trainasse between cypress knees at first light with the moss hanging low enough to part with your hand, and somewhere in the first hour a bass plan becomes a bowfin story. This has been happening in south Louisiana for about two hundred years. The local name is choupique, which is pronounced shoe pick, and which gets said in roughly the tone you would use for a relative who keeps borrowing your truck.
The fish itself is older than most of what swims past it. A long heavy body, a fin down the whole back like a keel turned upside down, a head that looks armored because it more or less is, and a swim bladder it can breathe with, which is why you will see one roll and gulp in water so warm and dead that nothing else could survive an afternoon in it. That last trick is the whole reason they are there. When August cooks the back sloughs down to soup and everything else has moved out to the current, the choupique is still home and still hungry.
They do not eat a lure politely. A bass takes a spinnerbait and you feel a thump. A bowfin takes it and the sound arrives before the feeling does, a flat wet crack like somebody dropped a brick off a dock, and then the line is going somewhere at a speed that makes you check your drag mid fight. They pull much harder than they have any right to and they do not tire on schedule. Our partner that morning had one on for eight minutes and kept saying it was a big bass right up until the moment it was visibly not a big bass, at which point he changed the subject.
Getting the hook back is the part where you earn the story. A choupique in the bottom of an aluminum boat is a loud event. It will not lie still, it will not be reasoned with, and it has teeth it enjoys owning. Long pliers, a wet towel over the head, and a certain amount of luck. There is an old Basin rule about not putting your thumb in one, and everyone learns that rule in the same expensive way, which is why the man telling it to you always looks at his own hand while he says it.
They are not bad eating if you do the work, which involves a smoker and more patience than most people bring to a Saturday. We let ours go, because a fish that has been doing this since before the cypress were cut has earned an afternoon off. It swam about four feet, turned around, and sat there in the tea colored water looking at the boat. We left first.
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