Of Ants and Minnows and the Ends of Worms

… Of Ants and Minnows and the Ends of Worms
As a little boy, I would spend hours watching ants fight and fishing for minnows. About the ants…. In Salina we had some fairly fearsome ants. The big red ones were the toughest. I would take two big ants and rub their heads together until they were really mad at each other and then watch them fight. It seems to me now, that I would spend hours and hours watching them but it may not have been that long.
About the minnows…. Minnows are tiny little fish about the size of a small feeder goldfish. Salina creek (pronounced crIck) ran about 60 feet behind my house. It was a small stream with some small fishing holes about two feet and six feet across full of minnows. I would take a two or three foot willow and attatch a very small hook (about 1/16 of an inch) to the end of the three to four foot piece of fishing line and add a tiny piece of an earthworm that I had dug up, to the hook and fish for many hours. I would catch many little fish and put them in a jar of water. I would feed some to the cats and put the rest in the horse trough (a 50 gallon metal drum cut in half lengthwise full of water for the horses to drink out of). I would keep them alive there for as long as I could so I could feed them to the cats. I don’t know if the horses drank a lot of little fish or not. I was probably six to nine years old when I did these exciting activities.