NEW YORK, N.Y. ? I was in New York’s Chinatown holding up a Dec. 22 copy of the Lawrence Journal-World, trying to show a large, not-so-friendly fishmonger a picture of buffalo fish being hauled into a boat at Clinton Lake.

“Buffalo fish? Buffalo fish? You want to buy buffalo fish — how many, how many?” asked the man at the rear of the crowded fish stall.

I told him the fish were shipped from Kansas to New York — to Chinatown.

He wasn’t interested.

I told him I wanted to take a picture of him holding a buffalo fish. I didn’t want to buy a fish.

“Five dollars for picture, five dollars for picture,” he said rapidly.

In a blur he turned, stuck his gloved hands into a tank and came up facing me, holding a large, live fish. My digital camera was still in my pocket.

In the subfreezing temperature the camera was slow to respond and my subject was getting testy. Workmen around us were chanting “five dollars,” others “10 dollars.”

The camera clicked and the flash went off. He started to toss the fish back in the tank.

Fish cutter Ming Zhe Pio holds a live buffalo fish from a water tank in a Mott Street market in New York's Chinatown. Tons of buffalo, a carp-like fish belonging to the sucker family, are shipped from Clinton Lake to New York every year.

I told him I wanted to take another — I told him the fish’s eyes blinked. He wasn’t buying it — he was selling.

“More pictures twenty dollars. Twenty dollars.”

His co-workers added their twenty-dollars’ worth. Some were grinning but looking away. I suspected I was the early evening entertainment.

When the batteries finally recycled I shot another picture. Still holding the buffalo he extended a wet rubber glove, “Twenty dollars, twenty dollars,” he said.

I pointed over my shoulder to my wife Dona saying, “Money.” She recalled out loud that the original price was $5. While she pulled out five singles, one at a time, I took two more pictures.

A customer points to one of the fish on a bed of ice in a market on Mott Street in New York's Chinatown. At the rear of the shop, live buffalo fish in tanks were also available for .80 per pound.

She handed him $5, he tossed the fish back in the tank and with no expression said, “Get out of here.”

A few patrons smiled as we walked out of the stall. One man said, “They’ve got great fish here.”

I stopped out front for just one more and a fish seller waved his arm and said, “Leave, leave, leave.”

The fish shop on Chinatown’s Mott Street had taken a couple of hours to find. We’d stop in a shop, ask for live buffalo fish and someone would point and say, “next door.” Finally it was.

On the subway heading back to our hotel, I told my wife about Leonard Jirak’s experience photographing buffalo fish in Chinatown. He’s a biologist who works for the Kansas Department of Fish and Wildlife.

He’s been involved in the removal of buffalo from Kansas lakes for years.

Commercial fisherman J.D. Bell pulls his net, loaded with buffalo fish, into his boat on Clinton Lake last December. The next day Bell shipped 18,000 pounds of live fish to New York to be sold in fish markets.

“While I was in New York I thought it would be neat to see the species being harvested in Kansas and take some pictures of them in the tanks,” Jirak told me.

He said he noticed a Chinese man chopping fish with a cleaver behind the counter. When his flash went off, the man with the cleaver yelled at Jirak.

“When I took another picture, he started coming around the counter waving the meat cleaver,” he said.

Jirak left, he said — “in a big hurry.”

From my wife’s reaction, I think I’d have lost my cashier in the fish market had I told Jirak’s story on the way to Chinatown.

In re-reading the story the newspaper ran in December about buffalo fishing at Clinton Lake, it reminded me that commercial fisherman J.D. Bell pays Kansas from 1 to 3 cents a pound for the privilege of removing the fish from the lake. In an ever-changing fish market, Bell sells his fish to brokers for between 10 cents and 60 cents a pound.

¢ Freshwater buffalo hunt (12-22-02)

While I was trying to focus on a fish, my wife asked a clerk the price of live buffalo.

$1.80 a pound.