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Bosque del Apache can sometimes be a rough place if you’re a bird or more likely if you’re a fish. Located in the southern part of New Mexico near Socorro, it is nestled right where lots of drama of the most violent kind has occurred. The entire area has been a hotbed of bad behavior since people have known about it, with more than its share of seedy characters of all sorts hanging around doing dastardly deeds and generally being unrepentantly unrepentant.

You can go far enough back in history to find that even one patch of dirt didn’t like the patch next to it in the area around Bosque del Apache and it didn’t get any better as time went on. Just recently, like in the 1700’s, the Comanche’s, the bad boys of the southwestern tribes were active and doing every manner of awful stuff, raiding settlements, capturing or killing the inhabitants, causing a high level of fearfulness to the point where people just said the hell with it and moved back to where ever they came from.

Then you had the Mexicans who ran the place with a pretty tough hand in the early 1800’s, they forced everybody to eat those really hot little green chilies, habernos I think they’re called, it makes my mouth burn just to say the name, whether they wanted to or not. That ought to have been a hanging offense right there. Even Kit Carson, and you know how bad he was, he was like the Honey Badger who wasn’t scared of nothing said “OK I was going to retire here and start a sheep ranch, but these people are just too damn hard to get along with.” and he packed up and went somewhere safer like the Indian Nation or somewhere, and this was in the mid-1800’s already. They had movable type back east and weren’t far off from electric lights and radios by then, and he was scared to live there. Kit Carson! That would be like John Wayne saying he was scared to live near L.A.

Billy the Kid was a regular and you know he liked to tear stuff up. The place was just stuffed to the gills with outlaws. Even today in the 21st century they will charge you more for gasoline down there than anywhere else and just laugh at you when you complain about it. It’s a rough place that New Mexico, just watch it when you go down there.

All through its history the desperadoes, malcontents and just downright mean characters have passed through this neighborhood and one of the worst to come down the pike has been this guy. Simply known as Fishkiller, no ones knows his real name, where he’s from or  how long he’s going to stay, nothing at all, except they know not to mess with him. When you see him sitting there on the bank putting out that evil eye you know that soon some fish is going to die. Known to be a holy terror with that rapier-like bill he has no compunction what so ever about removing the life force from any living fish he sees. There’s many a grieving carp widow hiding in the long grass under the bank sobbing over her missing husband because he went out for a minnow and never came home. All that remained was the sinister shadow of the Fishkiller splayed across the calm surface of the stream and the spreading ripples of the departed.

I told you Bosque del Apache could be dangerous. I wasn’t kidding. So if you’re going to be down there some time and you have a favorite fish don’t be calling for him if you even think the Fishkiller is in the area. I’m just saying. Not wanting to tell you what to do or anything but now you know and if you go ahead and get that fish killed it’s on you. I warned you. OK then, have a nice day.