Do you just love, love, love crawfish? How would you like to earn a living raising and catching this Cajun delicacy?

First, buy the Farm - Buy or lease very flat land in a southern state (you'll do most of your work in January through May - try west Louisiana or east Texas). Make sure it's near a bayou or other source of water. You'll need plenty of water, so get rights to take it.

Make the Pond - Get out the bulldozer and build a levee around the property which you want to flood. Don't forget permits. Buy a water pump and fill your pond with twelve to sixteen inches of water.

Liven it Up - Stock the pond with crawfish. You can buy these at the end of the season (early summer) for about ten cents a pound, according to Boudreaux. You may want to grow rice in the pond, for crawfish food. Stock both genders, and wait. Enjoy the wait - you'll start busting your butt in January.

Tough it Out - Your first, and maybe second season will suck so bad, that, on a daily basis, you'll regret you ever got into this. You'll have problems inherent with introducing this new element into the local ecosystem. You'll have problems getting water, keeping water, keeping the water clean, keeping things out of the water...

Your biggest problem will be the party scene you've created; the wildlife will crash the place like it's a frat house on keg night. Look out for water moccasins and other snakes, turtles, nutria rats, and a variety of critters that are higher on the food chain than your critters. You'll have problems with birds charging your pond and swooping off with your profits. You'll even have humans with big hands and wet feet. Bookie has cockleberry plants in two ponds, to keep the birds away. Heavy gates and Lester, a duck hunter with a shotgun, keep the people away.

And all that is only if your crawfish do "take." That is, if they adapt to the water in your pond and they reproduce and grow. If they do, then you're ready to work.

Set the Trap - Just because it's your pond and you built it, and those crustaceans in there are yours, doesn't mean they'll listen to you and come when you call them - you've got to catch them. Bookie has three forty-acre ponds (as Boudreaux so specifically puts it; "We have three ponds; this one is forty acres, and that one is forty acres, and the other one is forty acres.") If your pond is the size of any of these three, you'll want about 3,000 traps in it.

Your traps are bell-shaped cages of wire mesh, about two feet tall, with three inlets near the bottoms, and openings at the tops formed by pieces of five-inch PVC pipe. Drive metal rods into your pond bottom, so they poke up a few inches out of the water, to set the traps on.

You'll need to bait the traps, with crawfish bait, of course. It smells like peanut butter, and is cylinder shaped, like a tube of very hard cookie dough. Get several fifty-pound bags and cut the bait into small pieces.

Power Up - Unless you want to slog through the mud for months, crushing crawfish and dodging snakes, you'll want a boat with a motor. Any twelve-foot john boat will do, but, since your water is only about a foot deep, your outboard motor will act more like a rototiller. You'll need a "go-devil," a large lawnmower engine, mounted sideways on a universal pivot, with a five-foot long shaft attached to a propeller. You swing this devil around like a big broom, waving it in the water to basically push the stern of your boat, which is where you're facing, because this thing is so awkward, and the first few times you try this, you'll probably fall out of the stupid boat, but you'll get the hang of it.

Work Your Tail Off - Ready? OK, It's January, and you are a crawfisherman. Quit your day job, because, for the next five months, seven days a week, you will live on this pond.

Each day, you and somebody with a strong back, whom you enticed with an unreasonable hourly wage and the promise of facefuls of crawfish, will climb into the boat and will harvest your crop. One of you will steer the devil while the other will stand in the bow and grab each trap as you pull past it. You will dump the catch on a table, toss the undersized ones back and sweep the keepers in a bag. You will then bait the trap and set it back on the rod. This you will do thousands of times each day, for five months, until you positively hate, hate, hate crawfish.