Stan retrieves his lure, cranking the reel handle with gnarled fingers. It's said of baseball catchers that shaking their hands feels like squeezing a bag full of peanuts, but foul tips can't begin to smash fingers the way wagon hitches and power takeoffs can. Compared to old farmers like Stan, catchers have the hands of concert pianists.

"You hear those city people say we don't have any nature left," he says, making a long cast towards the shore. "They should come out here and see this."

From my seat in the bow I see a landscape completely remade by the hand of man on the throttle of a bulldozer. Beyond the shoreline, terraced rows of corn surround us on all sides, nearly head-high under the July sun. Waves of heat mirage shimmer above the tassels. In the distance, a thin line of trees marks the course of the straightened creek.

We're fishing a small farm pond, formed by three earthen walls pushed up around a wet spot at the bottom of a hill. The water is warm and murky, much too much so for any trout, walleye, or smallmouth to ever call it home. Fortunately for us, largemouth bass think pond water's just fine--Stan's dinner is finning stoically on his stringer, and we've caught and released any number of smaller fish.

Largemouths don't merely survive in the hundreds of thousands of farm ponds into which they've been introduced across the country, they prosper. Given enough bluegills for roughage, a farm-pond bass can grow to state record size, such as the 13-pound. 2-ounce fish from Ohio, or the 11-pound, 12-ouncer from a Kansas "tank." Unlike such accomplished survivors as the carp or the English sparrow, the farm pond largemouth is as sporty as it is adaptable. That trait elevates him to the level of the ringneck pheasant, another celebrated transplant (albeit from much farther away) who thrives in grain fields that haven't seen a prairie chicken in decades.

From a sportsman's point of view, the two are not without their similarities. Remington 870s and overalls are proper attire for pheasants anywhere worth hunting them, and those same overalls, plus a spinning rod and a small rowboat are all the gear you need for pond bassing. A cock pheasant or a decent pond bass makes a meal by itself, which still matters to people removed, at most, two generations from the farm. We call one a rooster, the other a hog, correctly implying you needn't travel much farther than your uncle's place to find either one. Pheasants and bass both lurk, invisible, under heavy cover, but neither is much for subtlety when it's time to commit, whether flushing raucously from a cornfield or blasting through the algae to engulf a frog.

Last fall, the distinction between the two blurred completely for me when I shot a rooster on a raw November morning, dropping him into the middle of a farm pond. The stiff wind was supposed to push him to shore where my non-swimming dog and I waited. Instead, the bird hung up on a snag where, on a warmer day, I'd once tossed plugs at a bass. That recollection gave me an idea. I went down to the farmhouse, came back with a borrowed spinning rod and a Flatfish, snared the bird, and reeled him in.

As I unhooked the dripping rooster, the scene suddenly made a certain, skewed sense: a pheasant probably would take a lure like a Flatfish, or perhaps a noisy, bright yellow plug imitating an escaping kernel of corn. Not, at any rate, a size 18 Adams. And a bass might cackle if it vocalized at all. Nothing less than a load of high brass 5s would knock a largemouth down consistently.

We will consider the correct choke and barrel length for bass another time and return to the subject of catching them on rod and reel. Farm pond bass fishing is rarely a matter of covering water, prospecting for fish.

In fact, since many farm ponds aren't all that much bigger than Olympic pools, you're presenting your lures to a captive audience. One pond I fish frequently is about one acre in size, basically just a clay bowl full of water, and the farmer keeps the grass on the banks shorter than most suburban lawns. The bottom of his pond is as neat as the ground around it. In addition to bass, he's stocked white amur, a kind of large, grass-eating carp from Asia, who trim the algae and aquatic plants the way a flock of sheep mows a pasture. In a pond as featureless as this one, the bass are everywhere and nowhere in particular. You just walk around the edge, casting, figuring your lure must never be far from a fish.

Most farm ponds offer a little more in the way of structure to shelter the fish and focus the fisherman--a point or two, a few snags, maybe a stand of cattails. If the farmer is a serious fisherman, he may have even dumped some brush and old Christmas trees into the water, weighing them down with cinder blocks. The most important cover for pond bass, however, are weeds and algae.

By late June, the plants have grown so thick in the near tropical humidity of summer that shore fishing most ponds becomes nearly impossible and no fun at all. Any fish you hook quickly entangles itself in so many pounds of muskgrass that it feels more like a snagged rubber tire than a bass as you haul it in. Better then to fish from a float tube, a fiberglass canoe, or one of those miniature plastic bass boats that fit in the back of a van.

From the middle of the pond fishing in, you can cast to the edge of the weedbeds and let an unweighted worm flutter slowly down past bass hanging suspended in the nooks and crannies among the weeds. Often bass will dart out and grab your lure the instant it touches water, buttonhooking immediately for the safety of the weeds. I try always to cast perpendicular to the weedline, so I can more easily snub a hooked fish out into open water and away from the greenery.

Don't neglect the middle of a pond, either, just because it holds no apparent structure. There are often bass out cruising the open water, like small town teenagers with nothing to do. These idlers can usually be convinced to strike a spinner or twistertail. Often, too, they will crowd around a motionless surface lure, eyeing it balefully until one decides to give it a whack, perhaps on a bet from the others.

Early in the year, up until spawning time, the water will be open enough for you to stalk the banks, looking for bass on the nests. A plastic worm plopped into their nests, or a large Rapala dragged past their noses will sometimes irritate them into striking. Even without polarized glasses, it's easy to spot spawning bass in the shallows. Crowds of bluegills and smaller bass look on, loitering quietly until one small fish strays across an invisible boundary and the bass scatters the whole group with a threatening rush. Before the ripples have faded, all the fish are back where they were, motionless again.

My biggest pond bass was a spawning female, caught on a May afternoon when I was 10 years old. The huge, aloof fish showed no interest in my jointed minnow whatsoever, no matter how many times I retrieved it across her path. Finally, one more cast, no different than any of its predecessors, provoked a mild strike. Tiring of the annoyance, the bass picked up the lure to move it out of the nest, and I set the hook. Since the fish hit all of three feet from the rod tip, it was not so much a matter of playing it as simply allowing the bass to beach itself, after which I let her go. Even at that age I knew spawners should be returned to the water, both the trophy females and the smaller males who guard the eggs.

Bass like those are very much the big fish in small ponds you hear about. While they're the masters of their three-acre domains, they can be intimidated by the sight of a big, garish spinnerbait and porkrind, with rubber hackles quivering and a spinner churning out propwash, all towed by a hawser of monofilament. The typical bassing rig--bait casting rod, heavy line, big lures--doesn't fare as well on ponds as do light or even ultra-light spinning rods, lighter lines, and smaller lures.

That said, it must be admitted that pond bass lack the jaded sophistication of impoundment fish who see dozens of different metal-flake hulls motoring by every weekend. They're often underfished and seem always to be hungry, so much so that sometimes I'm guilty of taking them for granted. If an especially cranky mood strikes, I'll dismiss man-made ponds and their stocked bass populations among the cornfields as little better than those roadside "fishing" attractions where you can catch all the half-bright trout you want on doughballs for so much per pound, while cars whiz by on the highway.

When I start thinking those thoughts, it's time to see my familiar waters through someone else's eyes again, and I invite someone fishing. Last summer I took a widely traveled angler out after work late one afternoon. Through some adroit four-wheeling he maneuvered his boat and trailer to a secluded pond in a woodlot and backed it in. As we pushed the boat into the water, a great blue heron flushed ponderously into the sky, neck held in a tight S, long legs trailing behind, looking to me, as they always do, like some last, lonely pterodactyl. We heard the slap of a beaver's tail, and doves cooed their melancholy note.

The boat was a 16-foot, V-bottomed Lund, far bigger than needed for a farm pond, but so stable we could both walk around in it as if we were fishing from a small island. With the trolling motor pulling us along silently, parallel to the shore, we worked the weeds by the dam first, catching several smaller fish and a couple of nice ones. During lulls between strikes the conversation turned to fishing trips--to Saskatchewan, Minnesota, Lake Oahe, the Roaring Fork in Colorado--my guest having been many places and having far more stories to tell than I.

"You know," I finally said, apologetically, "these days, I don't get to travel much. I have to do all my fishing right here."

The swallows had come out, skimming low over the water in graceful curves. My guest said earnestly: "If I had a pond like this, I wouldn't fish anywhere else."

Behind us, out in the cornfields, we heard a rooster pheasant crow.