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Historical accounts of upper basin endangered fish 12 the grayling? 'Oh no, not grayling, the other ones with big, big mouths.' No I said I never seen one. He said, 'You take your .22,' and he showed me a spot down there. "He says 'You shoot yourself a cottontail.' And I tell you I watched on that spot up there. One of them got pretty close, well I plugged him. "Well I kept the cottontail, Wilson wasn't in and I didn't know what to do with the cottontail, and I wanted to go fishing you know. Just about when I was ready to go, here he comes. I said I got a cottontail. He said, 'Well cut off his head.' I thought to myself, I wonder what he's going to do with that head. "I went and cut off the head he comes out of the cabin with a pretty good- sized hook. And he hooked it right there by the head and he tied it on the line and he said to go down there in a certain place and just throw it in, let it ride on down until you run out of line and then just hold it there. "I did half way using up line you know, but something, he didn't give me a big jerk, but I knew that something was' on there. It wouldn't make no fight of any kind. When I was close enough I got out and could see the sandbar there and said, by God I better work myself down toward the sandbar so I could pull it in. I couldn't lift it. On a sandbar I started dragging it in. It weighed around 18 pounds." Perhaps the best example of the Colorado squawfish's aggressiveness comes from a story where an angler coaxed an overly pugnacious squawfish to shore without it ever touching bait or a hook. Dale Stewart (Vernal, Utah) recalls the catch: "We'd go fishing up in Green River Gorge, and my dad would set out about eight setlines. Then we'd sit and fish by the setlines. This line that I was sitting by, it would go like that about two or three times, and my dad said, 'Son, why don't you pull that in. I think it got the bait.' I pulled that line in like that (quickly hand over hand), and it wasn't a real sloping bank. A to-pound whitefish (Colorado squawfish) shot out on the sand after the bait. He'd a got back in the river, but I was there, just threw him out on the bank and had him for supper." Photo courtesy of Wanda Staley John Robbins supports a stringer of Colorado squawflsh caught In the Green River near Island Park In the late 1920s.