I used to spend a lot of time fishing on farm ponds. Back when I was younger there were ponds like that everywhere and many of them actually had water and good fish in them. But today, finding a farm pond with good fish is like being struck by lightning, only not as painful.

Most of our ponds have dried up due to drought.

Healthy farm ponds are their own finite ecosystems.

Fish like largemouth bass and crappy and Channel Cat and Bluegill

thrive in these ponds, but aside from that,

those ponds are a stable source of water for animals, both wild and domestic.

And sometimes they are a source of water for the stranger creatures of this world.

Literally, they're places where the things go bump in the night.

A few years ago I was fishing in one of these ponds. It wasn't especially big, but it was still a pretty good size.

It had a marginal population of bass and a nice community of Croppy, and though I had not witnessed it, I was told there were even a few channel cats lurking in the depths.

My friend Terry and I decided we were going to do some night fishing to see if we might tangle with some of those mythical catfish we had heard about.

We had seen some crawdads and water dogs in preparation for bank fishing that we were planning.

Just before dark when we got there, we quickly set up for the night.

There was a nice spot on the bank that gave us full access to the main part of the pond.

Now in the middle of the pond was a large tree with a few smaller trees scattered around it.

There were lines and lures and bobbers hanging from those tree limbs like Christmas ornaments in silent testament to the misfortune the farmer had suffered while fishing there.

I had caught my share of bass and croppy around those trees but on that night we were fishing for channel cats.

We had what we considered a foolproof plan mapped out complete with the kind of bait that was like

fried chicken to a catfish.

To our left, the pond narrowed a bit and curved around.

Access to the water there was partially blocked by brush and patches of cattails. Not far beyond that, the area was choked with

brush, but we managed to get five lines set out along that region. We walked a narrow cowpath with the pond on our right and the brush on our left and nothing but brush and a few tall trees and gully and washes to our

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