About this time each summer when the flowers are getting leggy and droopy in the long, sultry day, and the mockingbirds have stopped singing, I grumble, “Well, dog days are here again.” I remember that as a boy, the dog days were important times our young lives. It meant that August was at hand and only a few glorious weeks of freedom remained before the dreaded confinement of the classroom began once again.

Everyone knows that the dog days of summer occur during the hottest and muggiest part of the season, but why do we call the hot, sultry days of summer dog days?

In ancient times, when the night sky was not obscured by artificial lights and smog, people in different parts of the world drew images in the sky by connecting the dots of stars.

The brightest of the stars in Canis Major (the big dog) is Sirius, which also happens to be the brightest star in the night sky. In the summer, Sirius, the “dog star,” rises and sets with the sun, and the ancients believed that its heat added to the heat of the sun, creating a stretch of hot and sultry weather. They named this sweltering period of time dog days after the dog star.

As children, the heat and humidity of dog days never slowed us down a bit. For a day or two each week we could make a dollar a day helping the neighboring farmers bring in their winter hay. Also, it was the driest time of year and the river was usually at its shallowest.

But the ole swimmin’ hole beneath the railroad trestle was still deep. After a long day’s “haying it,” soaked with sweat and covered with itchy hay chaff, jumping into those refreshing, deep-green depths was like a little taste of heaven!

Another fond memory of dog-days’ activities was hand-catching bullheads in the shallow riffles of the river. Bullheads were small catfish which hid under rocks during the daytime, coming out to feed at night. A big bullhead would be about 10 or 12 inches long but most were in the seven- or eight-inch category, and they all had poisonous, needle-sharp spines on their back and gill-fins.

Catching them with your hands without getting a painful stab wound was pretty tricky. We it thought it was great fun as well as rewarding since the little cold-water fish were delicious fried-up crisp or in a succulent stew.

Most kids wouldn’t even touch one of the little critters, but my brother and I had perfected the art of what we called bullheading.

All that was needed was an old pair of sneakers for protecting your feet as the riverbed and shore were comprised of rocks of every size and description. The method was to wade in water about eight to 12 inches deep and not too swift, carefully turning over flat rocks.

The nocturnal bullheads weren’t fast swimmers and couldn’t see very well. They’d usually just wriggle along for a few yards and then stop, nestled against the rocky bottom. That’s when our bullheading skills came into play.

Both hands were used for immobilizing the fish until the fingers of one hand could carefully get a certain grasp that avoided the wicked little stingers. I remember some delightful dog days wading along in that cold water in quest of the little bullheads, the hot summer sun blazing down, reflecting off the crystal-clear surface, tanning our faces and bodies to a golden brown.

I remember some painful stinger wounds too, but it was marvelous fun! Oh, what nostalgia, writing this and remembering. I wish I could go bullheading once again.

This column originally appeared in the Aug. 5, 2003 edition of The T&D. Rush Button’s column appears every Tuesday. He can be reached at buttonrl@aol.com.

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