These were paddlefish, or Polyodon spathula, and we had caught the peak of paddlefishing season at the Lower Yellowstone Diversion Dam, 17 miles north of Glendive, Mont. — four or five days in late May or early June, when, a game warden had all but promised, “you just throw your line in, and it’s hard not to catch one.”
I was having no such luck, and Alec, my 4-year-old son, was far too small to fish. The river was high, and paddlefish can weigh as much as 200 pounds and grow seven feet long.
Because paddlefish have no teeth, they eat zooplankton. And because of that you don’t try to catch them with bait, but with weighted four-pronged hooks. “You keep whipping the line through the water as you reel it in and hope you snag one as it’s swimming by,” one angler, Wes Jardstrom, advised.
Eastern Montana is a far cry from the Montana of the popular imagination, of which the areas around Bozeman and Missoula tend to be ethnographic centers: the Montana of fly-fishing and horse whispering and ruggedly genteel authors like Thomas McGuane. Though there are some stock growers and cowboys here — and a legendarily rowdy bucking-horse sale every May in Miles City — there are few vacationers and mostly wheat farmers, forgotten towns and high plains with lunarlike terrain that forms the American badlands.