Something Was Out There In The Bayou - True Stories From Louisiana

St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, March 2016.

I was helping my brother-in-law with his crawfish ponds.

He has several ponds divided by levees, and during the season, somebody had to be out there early checking the traps, rebating them, and watching water levels.

We harvested from one of those shallow crawfish boats that has a hydraulic drive wheel on the back, so you could go right over the levees without having to pull the boat out of the water every time.

The boat moves slowly through the water as you work the traps one after another.

So you pull a trap, dump out the crawfish, rebait it, and set it back.

Over the last week, we'd been finding all kinds of traps messed with.

Some were tipped over.

Others had been pulled right out of the water.

The bait was gone out of them, but they were empty of crawfish.

We figured somebody was stealing the crawfish.

That morning, I started out just after daylight.

We'd had a very rainy night, but the morning was very clear.

I could see clear across the first couple ponds.

I'd worked about 30 traps when I noticed one of the traps farther ahead was moving.

I stopped the boat.

I looked at the trap and saw it rock again.

Then the whole thing came up out of the water, but I saw that something was holding it.

So I thought to myself, well, there it is.

I just caught our thief.

Before I realized what it was, I yelled out across the pond at them.

I called them some very not nice names.

They heard me, and they turned around.

They were looking right at me.

That's when I got a sense of its shape and a little bit of its size.