It’s sunrise-early on Sunday morning, and cold.

J.D. Bell gently throttles his big aluminum flat-bottom boat through a black forest of dead trees poking through the waters of Clinton Lake on the west edge of Lawrence. The exhaust from his 75-horse Johnson clings to the water in small clouds.

“See, there goes one,” he says with hushed enthusiasm, pointing a gloved finger to a v-shaped ripple in the water. It’s moving like a submarine away from the bank.

“That’s a buffalo … lots of fishermen think that’s bass, but that’s a big buffalo.”

Bell’s face is hidden behind sunglasses, under the bill of a ball cap and shadowed by a hooded sweatshirt, but his voice gives him away. He’s excited.

Shayne Chesmore, standing on the frost-covered platform at the front of the boat, points to another watery wedge pushing across the surface.

“Oh they’re out there,” Bell says gleefully. “We ain’t going to run around and catch a few, we’ll walk down and catch ’em all.”

He laughs the laugh of a man holding the deed to your home.

Bell, 46, is a commercial fisherman who harvests the lake’s bounty with nets. By noon he’ll have more than 2,000 pounds of buffalo –160 or so fish averaging about 14 pounds each — in the 300-gallon stock tank he hauls on his boat. Last Saturday, he and his five-man, three-boat crew netted 7,000 pounds of buffalo.

A couple of days after they were caught, they were in a tanker truck rolling east to Brooklyn and Chinatown in New York, where they’re sold live in fish markets.

Clearing the lake

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“The big-mouth buffalo compete in the food chain with sport fish like black or white bass,” says Richard Sanders, a Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks biologist working at Clinton Lake. “Like carp, they’re the strongest-fighting fish around but are considered second-class citizens in the aquatic environment.”

Like minnows, shad and game fish, buffalo are plankton feeders. During their 20-year life span, they eat a lot, compared with the smaller bass that live only four years. They grow to an average of 20 pounds.

“Instead of maintaining huge buffalo, this (catching them) should free up lots of food for sports fish and gizzard shad,” Sanders says.

Harvesting worked in Melvern Lake, seven miles south of Lyndon in Osage County. It’s about the same size as Clinton Lake, 7,000 acres. In 1992, Bell’s crew pulled 800,000 pounds of buffalo from Melvern.

Wildlife and Parks fisheries biologist Leonard Jirak has numbers that show the impact buffalo have on sport fishing.

“In 1994, fishermen caught 374 walleye and in 2001 the number of catches was 3,798,” Jirak says of pre- and post-harvest sport fishing at Melvern.

Catch and release numbers for black bass were even more impressive. So far in 2002, 10,000 bass have been caught and released compared with 238 in 1994.

“The first lake where buffalo were harvested was Lovewell in north central Kansas — in the 1970s,” Jirak says. “After they took out half a million pounds, Lovewell became one of the better walleye fishing spots in the country.”

Sanders says he hopes Bell can haul 250,000 pounds of buffalo out of Clinton by next April or May.

“As long as J.D. Bell has the market to sell the fish in New York, it’s a good situation for us,” Sanders says.

Setting the nets

Sunday morning, after making a tour of unfished buffalo territory, Bell meets up with the two other boats in the netting operation. Today they’ll fish in the timber on the south side of the lake.

Each boat carries 500 to 800 yards of plastic net with 4-inch openings, large enough to permit all but large fish to pass through. Anything other than buffalo caught in the net is returned to the water.

John Gilbin of Dallas City, Ill., and Lonnie Keehner of Guttenberg, Iowa, each with a partner, handle the other boats. Both are veteran fishermen.

“I’ll bet you guys are blanching under your collars waiting to get in these virgin timbers,” Bell says as they chat briefly before setting their nets.

They attach the ends of their tied-down gill nets to branches sticking out of the water. Together, they make a 600-yard-long semicircle. The net runs through Bell’s bare hands on its way to the water. Chesmore of Council Grove handles the motor, backing away from the net.

“How we doing, Shayne … good job on the motor … how much water do we have,” Bell chatters as he watches the nets sink into the water.

“Nine feet,” Chesmore reports.

“Let me know when we hit six,” Bell says.

‘Look at them!’

Bell shakes and jiggles the net to get out tangles and knots, never stopping the boat as the net goes into the water. He ties old plastic milk jugs to the top rope every few minutes. When they start dancing on the water, he’ll know fish have hit the nets.

Two eagles fly overhead. Geese and ducks join the tranquil traffic pattern over the south end of the lake. The only noise on the water is the quiet idling of three outboard motors.

When all the nets are in place, the boats weave between the trees to get inside the nets. The fishermen in the boats are standing, dodging the spear-pointed tree limbs cluttering the paths between tree trunks. Bell places two fingers of snuff in his mouth, takes one more look around the neighborhood, and picks up a two-foot club.

He’s ready.

He begins banging a club on the side of the boat’s quarter-inch thick hide. Chesmore looks like he’s killing snakes as he beats the end of a broom stick on the drumlike bow. Now all six men are either banging on their boats or poking holes in the water with toilet plungers fastened on long poles. The boats travel slowly in an arc, driving the buffalo toward the nets.

“They’re tearing the nets,” a gleeful Bell yells as the plastic jugs bounce. “Look at them buffalo run!”

Bell notices the fish heading in one direction.

“They’re running in packs — that’s good,” he says.

‘Pounding fish’

The beating and noise-making last about 20 minutes, making the buffalo’s home under the trees a miserable place.

“Now you see why they call this ‘pounding fish,’ ” a grinning Bell says, still banging on his boat.

When the fishermen return to their nets, the jugs are motionless.

Bell begins pulling in the heavy net, hand-over-hand. In seconds, the first buffalo, about a 16-pounder, breaks the water. To grab the fish and a handful of net, Bell’s bare hand reaches lower than his feet into the cold water. In one movement he straightens up and swings the fish onto a board fastened to the end of the stock tank. He and Chesmore pull the fish loose from the net and push it into the tank.

Sometimes there are two fish, sometimes five, at times making Bell’s wiggly, slippery lift more than a hundred pounds. It’s one of the reasons people aren’t standing in line to get his job.

The water-to-board-to-tank motion lasts, uninterrupted, for more than an hour, netting about 160 buffalo. Some weigh 35 pounds. Nothing but buffalo are caught in Bell’s net.

With his tank filled to the brim with fish and a compressor pumping breathable oxygen into their gills, Bell points his boat toward the far side of Clinton Lake and the 1029 Douglas County Road boat ramp.

Break time

It’s past noon when he pulls up a white bucket and sits down for the first time since he got in his boat at 7:30 a.m.

He’s been fishing with a net since he was 16.

“My first job was oaring the boat,” Bell says. “The guy I worked for was too cheap to use the motor until he had a boatload of fish.”

Bell pays the state between 1 cent and 3 cents per pound to net buffalo from Kansas lakes. He sells them through fish brokers in New York. Depending on the market, he’ll get between 10 cents and 60 cents per pound.

“The market is best in December and drops off in the summer,” Bell says, rubbing his white forehead. He talks about how cold water makes the buffalo easier to handle — they move slower. “Today is about as good as it gets.”

He’s not halfway through his 17-hour day.

“Now, when it gets to be 18 degrees, nets get stiff and motors don’t work right and your wet clothes freeze — it gets miserable.”

What happens then?

“Catch buffalo,” Bell says, laughing, rocking on his bucket.

When Clinton freezes he’ll move over to LaCygne Lake, where a power plant dumps hot water into the lake, making buffalo fishing possible year-round. Bell fishes about 350 days a year. His work schedule is 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week.

Finishing the journey

After pulling his loaded boat out of Clinton and onto a trailer, he heads for the catfish ponds he uses for storage. They’re north of Lawrence Municipal Airport.

There, he and Chesmore slide their catch down a ramp, one at a time, into a pond. After the last fish hits the water, they’re ready to head back to Clinton Lake for a second round of pounding fish.

“State says we have to be off the lake at sundown,” he says.

Minutes later they’re gone.

Early the next morning, Doug Snethen of Grand Rapids, Ohio, sits in the cab of his fish-hauling tractor-trailer near the spot where Bell and Chesmore unloaded their buffalo.

“It takes us 22 hours to drive to Brooklyn and Chinatown,” Snethen says. “I dump the fish into a wholesaler’s tanks through a basement window in an old brick building.”

This will be the sixth truckload of Clinton Lake buffalo shipped to Brooklyn since mid-October.

Six men using long seines work more than an hour moving thousands of buffalo into the shallow side of the pond, where the fish can be handled. They stand thigh-high in fish, tossing them into a basket that is lifted by crane to the truck’s fish tanks.

And who is scampering across the top of the tanks, dumping the baskets of fish into the truck?

Buffalo Bell.

Before noon, 18,000 pounds of Kansas buffalo are on their way to Brooklyn and the fish pounders are heading back for another roundup.