I was in my very early 20s and working several part time jobs and still living at home. I worked at the grocery store and at a gas station on weekends, and several other minor one day per week jobs.

 I had just returned home on a Friday night from my main job at the store, it was after 10-PM. I already knew that my dad was going fishing on some lake in upstate New York the following day with a fishing buddy of his. I was not able to go as I was scheduled to work that next day. I had expected him to sleeping already when I came home because of his required early departure.

Instead, he was sitting at the dining room table drinking coffee, waiting for me to come home. Dad had something to ask me. He and his fishing buddy needed nightcrawlers (earthworms) for bait. They could buy worms and other bait at the lake but the prices were staggering for what they could get and sometimes the live bait at the lake would be sold out for the day. They would then have had to drive back to the nearest town and pay equally high prices for what they needed, -if they could even find any.

Nightcrawler or Earthworm

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I might guess that a dozen earthworms (we call them nightcrawlers) might fetch $3.50 /dozen or if purchased lakeside. Over-inflated price in my opinion. On a good fishing day they might easily use 7 or 8 dozen. Knowing that I used to pick-up nightcrawlers at night for a local bait shop, he asked if I wouldn’t mind picking up some for him tonight for their impending trip. He offered to help and I agreed. We set out to the horse pasture with a 5-gallon gray bucket and two smaller milk jugs to carry on our person for holding our immediate captures, and flashlights which we would use for spotting the worms.

With flashlights in hand and sneaking around in a crouched-down position doing ‘the elephant walk,’ you can spot nightcrawlers with beam of light and grab them before they quickly steal away back into their burrow. Breaking a worm in half is not necessarily a bad thing. It happens quite often, worms do not want to be caught. The broken nightcrawler may still suffice for fishing but unbroken worms are best. Unbroken nightcrawlers remain fresher, livelier for a longer period. A dead worm in a bucket of live worms will make the whole bucket an icky, stinky mess rather quickly.

In that well-groomed horse pasture the conditions for catching nightcrawlers was ideal. With its close-cropped grass and well-compacted but loamy soil with many semi-bare and mossy sections from the treading of many horse hooves, it was one of my favorite and most productive places to harvest nightcrawlers.

I was catching a fair number of worms easily that night. I had caught maybe 4 or 5 dozen already and dad, -well, he was breaking more worms that he was catching. I was impressed that he was even making the effort to try. With the vision and infirmities of an otherwise healthy mid-50s year old, he was really overextending himself to try catching nightcrawlers. He had caught maybe a dozen so far but it truly was a herculean effort on his part.

The Most Nightcrawlers in One Night

The most nightcrawlers I ever caught in one night by myself was a count of some 112-dozen or more which I sold the following morning to that local bait shop for something like 30-cents per dozen? It seems like a low pay now but for a teenager back in the early 1980s it was easy and reliable money for a few hours’ worth of applied effort. I got paid something like $35.00 the next morning for that batch of lively nightcrawlers.

There Are Animals in the Field!

Anyway, dad was trying to help but I knew that his efforts were not greatly contributing to the final goal. He just didn’t want to send me out by myself to do this for him after my long day at work just so that he could go fishing. And then, it happened. He made a quick lunge towards what must have been a large nightcrawler and grabbed it. He retracted immediately and jumped to his feet, gasping and swearing. I will not repeat the fearful vulgarities he used, but it included the “C” word and several rapid interpositional uses of “the F-bomb” for good measure. I quickly turned my flashlight upon him and at what he was frantically pointing at on the ground.

In the bright flood of his flashlight he had spotted a long slender wet-looking thing which he mistook for a big fat nightcrawler, and grabbed for it. It was not a worm but the tail of a very large Spotted Salamander!

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The fleshy amphibian recoiled at his sudden grasping of its tail and it spun around in his pinch and hugged ahold of his fingers with cold wet arms and legs. Dad violently shook his hand until it came off his hand and was thrown to the ground. My dad hates reptiles and amphibians! We are talking ‘Indiana Jones fears big snakes’ FEAR of lizards, salamanders and their ilk.

The swearing stopped and I got dad calmed down, explained that this is a harmless amphibian. Spotted salamanders hunt and eat earthworms. Just ignore the salamander and move away from it. He did. He was still a bit jumpy, shivering and twitching. He kept making little grunting-whining noises as he relived the event in his mind a few more times as we resumed catching worms. I noted now that his flashlight beam was ’sweeping around’ quite a bit more. Clearly he was on the lookout for salamanders or other ghouls of the flesh that might be lying in wait, ready to jump-and-grab. His success at catching nightcrawlers alive and unbroken began to fall drastically. He was breaking almost every one now.

And Here Comes His Horse!

Now, with God as my witness I swear that I thought dad saw and heard that big old gray horse of his slowly approaching from the direction of the barn. I saw her coming from some distance away and dismissed her benign interest in us. She came plodding up slowly from behind and quite nonchalantly. Attracted to the flashlights and noise we were making in the middle of the field, she was coming to investigate us. This was a common experience for me; I had been expecting it actually.

That old horse would sometimes come to check me out when I was harvesting nightcrawlers and her curiosity satisfied, would eventually lumber off back towards the barn. Well, the horse walked up behind dad and paused. The old mare saw the gray 5-gallon bucket of nightcrawlers between us and probably mistaking this for a grain bucket, walked towards it instead.

Is it Grain?

The old mare stuck her snout into the bucket up to her eyes and realizing that the bucket contained worms not grain, snorted very loudly and jerked her head up violently which caused the bucket to fly up into the air and hit the ground with several thumps and thuds. These unexpected noises of the bucket caused the old mare to squeal and paw the ground with her front hooves and she snorted again through her nostrils in a defensive posture.

My dad yelped yet again and just about did a back flip! He did not see nor hear the horse approach. He was already more than a little flighty and supercharged with adrenalin from the wiggly amphibian-touching incident minutes before and this sudden commotion that took place was just too much!

Nearly falling down twice before he found his land legs, he staggered towards the upset 5-gallon bucket and dumped his meager dozen-plus worms into it and proclaimed firmly that he needs to go back to the house. -He said that he was done picking up nightcrawlers and mumbled something about there being too much (deletives) wildlife out here for him!

I tried to not laugh as his indignation of the creatures of the night that were seemingly all out to get him and consented to his exit. He hurried away, his flashlight sweeping a wide berth left-to-right along the path in front of him. I watched him leave and continued to gather nightcrawlers for another hour. I caught maybe 18 or 19 dozen nightcrawlers in total and felt that this would make for a full day of fishing, and I called it a night.

 Dad had a far better Saturday fishing on the lake the next day and we don’t talk much about that foggy Friday night picking up nightcrawlers in the horse pasture. The incident comes up occasionally at family get-togethers and even then, only after a beer or two have been drunk does the tale get re-told.