Thoreau’s horned pout

Thoreau’s World is a lovely book, though it contains some incorrect dates and an unusual error or two. For example, the editor, Charles R. Anderson, gives the source of “the winter of our discontent” as Henry VI, Part Three, V.5.81, whereas it’s actually from the famous soliloquy that begins with the very first line of Richard III. 

I’m grateful to Anderson, though, for noting that the horned pout, one of the fish Thoreau pulled from Walden, is none other than the common catfish (or brown bullhead, if you want to be technical). In college I once wrote a paper that took a close look at a single sentence about fishing for pouts in Walden Pond, yet I never realized this.

This doesn’t seem to be explained in Jeffrey Cramer’s annotated Walden, either, though Cramer does quote a passage from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers where Thoreau describes the horned pout in a way that provides some strong clues: “a dull and blundering fellow, and like the eel, vespertinal in his habits and fond of the mud.”