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LEIF ENGER: Every fish has its fanatics. Brian Plutko belongs to the lake sturgeon. Why? Two words.

BRIAN PLUTKO: 100 pounds. 100 pounds. Great fish. The fight, sturgeon is the best fish in Minnesota.

LEIF ENGER: Plutko, 23 years old, immortal, going through Marlboro's like Cracker Jack, sits at the water's edge in the town of Baudette There are monsters in the river. He can't take his eyes off it.

BRIAN PLUTKO: That's all I think about day and night. It's just catching. Going out and catching that sturgeon. I'm addicted to it. It's like being addicted to nicotine. I'm addicted to catching a sturgeon. It's just-- it's there. It's inside of me. I can't-- It's just the whole feel, the whole fight, the whole waiting. It's everything put together.

LEIF ENGER: Plutko caught his first sturgeon at 12. His biggest so far was 5 feet long and 65 pounds. A butcher by day, Plutko fishes nights, motoring out past the glittery boats full of walleye-seeking tourists. The show-off boats, he calls them, slouching past the show-offs in his grungy Alumacraft, anchoring in his secret place, gobbing a hook with nightcrawlers, awaiting his king of fishes.

BRIAN PLUTKO: They're like the tanks of the river. They just pretty much do what they want. They go where they want. And they see something they want, they'll take it, just like an owl to our woods. Everybody says, yeah, great wise owl. I think the sturgeon, myself, is the great wise fish of the river.

LEIF ENGER: Sturgeon have mystified through the ages. In North America, they've cropped up in fossils thought to be 60 million years old. Even those caught today would look at home embedded in stone.

On Lake of the Woods, Biologist Tom Heinrich works his way along a 900 foot gill net. The DNR catches and tags a few hundred sturgeon each spring. They're trying to figure out where the fish travel, how many are caught, and how many released?

TOM HEINRICH: Oh, there's one coming up here. I can feel it.

LEIF ENGER: Heinrich hoists a twisting sturgeon up over the gunwale. The fish has a back as broad as a thigh, sandpaper skin, no scales. Its angled tail fin betrays its relatives who are sharks. Heinrich takes measurements-- 46 inches long, 27 pounds, just a pup. An inch over legal size.

TOM HEINRICH: I think deep down somewhere, he knows we're trying to help him. Now at this point, even though we did this to him. They're very forgiving fish

LEIF ENGER: With a garden pruner, Heinrich clips out a 1-inch segment of the spined leading edge of the fish's pectoral fin. A cross section of this spine under a microscope will show well-defined rings, just like a tree, a ring for each year of the sturgeons life. There are sturgeon in this water that were young adults during the Civil War.

TOM HEINRICH: Lake of the Woods, I think, actually has one of the oldest sturgeon that has ever been aged. And if I recall, it was like 150 or 160 years old. And my understanding is it was caught up in the northern part of the lake near Kenora.

LEIF ENGER: The sturgeon's long life cycle has figured in both its decline and its comeback. A female doesn't spawn until she's 25 years old, and only once every five to nine years thereafter. That hurt in the early part of the century when they were fished commercially and nearly wiped out. But by 1960, the sturgeon faced another prominent threat, the discharge of effluent by paper mills on the Rainy River. Heinrich says the sturgeon, who are patient, just hunkered and waited for the Federal Clean Water Act to be thought up, written down, and passed into law.

TOM HEINRICH: The Rainy River was actually in pretty rough shape environmentally, just because of all the effluent wood fibers that, essentially, coated the bottom of the river. And what we see is we see sturgeon year classes starting to be formed in the late 1960s, which is about the time that the Clean Water Act really started coming online.

LEIF ENGER: Since then, the sturgeon's comeback has been continuous. Tourists who used to come strictly for walleye are now tantalized by the ancient looking fish with the shark-like tail. The stories they hear from people like resorter Larry Cobble are just too good to ignore.

LARRY COBLE: One time in a boat, I'm sitting in Lighthouse Gap in a 16-foot Lund with a 15 horse on it, me and another fellow. And he sets the hook on a fish. And now, the sturgeon, which is what it turned out to be, pulled us. And he pulled us, and he pulled us, and he pulled us. And about four miles later, the hook pulled out. But he pulled us four miles. And that wasn't bad when you consider we was going against the current.

LEIF ENGER: In 1855, the Poet Henry Longfellow wrote something similar, if more dramatic. His protagonist, the great Hiawatha, went pursuing Mishe-Nahma the King of Fishes, a monstrous sturgeon. Nahma withstood Hiawatha's taunts until they were too much to bear. And then, in his wrath, he darted upward, flashing, leaped into the sunshine, opened his great jaws and swallowed both canoe and Hiawatha.

BRIAN PLUTKO: I could see an 88-inch sturgeon in this body of water easily. I could see that very easily with a 40-inch girth. I mean, a head that weighs 20 pounds on this fish. I could see it. And I know it's down there. I just-- I can feel it.

LEIF ENGER: Unlike Hiawatha, who killed the giant Nahma from the inside out, angler Brian Plutko photographs each fish and sets it free. If enough others do the same, he says, then even centuries from now, people might have the pleasure of wondering what's down there.

BRIAN PLUTKO: Think about, jeez, there might be 100-pound sturgeon down there. It might be. Who knows, there might be a 200-pounder down there. It's just there. It's just that feeling, you know there's a 100-pound fish in this body of water, and you might catch him that night.

LEIF ENGER: Baudette angler Brian Plutko. The sturgeon season opens on the Rainy River, June 30. Leif Enger, Minnesota Public Radio.