Glenn Christie's fish story isn't quite the standard tale, but it's a good one. It involves a fish that measures just 7 inches but still could be the catch of his lifetime.

On Dec. 14, Christie, 64, of Cary was crappie fishing at Kerr Lake. That's not unusual because he fishes for crappie 12 months a year.

After launching at the Longwood boating access off N.C. 15, he motored his 16-foot Duracraft to a submerged brush pile and started dunking minnows in 18 feet of water.

It was a little golden fish, one of 32 fish he caught that day that was destined to become the star of his story.

As the fish came into focus as it was being reeled in from the depths, Christie was puzzled.

"I thought I had a raccoon perch," he said, "until he turned on his side, and then I didn't know what I had."

Christie put the fish in his livewell for safekeeping and called the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission's headquarters in Raleigh, where Christian Waters, fisheries research coordinator for the Piedmont region, happened to be visiting from Smithfield.

"I talked to a handful of people, and we didn't know what he had," Waters said.

"My first thought was that you see a lot of strange things out in the wild and it could be genetic anomaly, or maybe something like a freshwater drum."

Waters said that when he called Christie back, it was obvious that Christie knew the Kerr Lake fish species. Waters then consulted Scott Van Horn, a fellow fisheries biologist.

"A golden crappie," Van Horn said after Waters described the fish.

Turns out Van Horn had some experience with the variant from a pond in Granville County that produced golden crappie from time to time.

Waters guesses that Christie's fish is genetic mutant with a recessive gene, something similar to albinism.

But Waters wasn't stopping with that. The investigation would continue.

"Call Wayne Starnes at the Museum of Natural Sciences," Waters suggested to me. "He's our go-to guy when we have tough identification cases."

So the call was made.

"Never heard of one," Starnes, the research curator of fishes, said with a laugh. "I've gone through a lot of fish in 35 years, and I've never seen one."

After his conversation with Waters, Christie introduced the crappie to a new home, a 2,500-gallon koi pond in his backyard.

"He seems to like it in there," Christie said. "He even ate a few minnows the first day he was in there."

A lattice with a black shade screen keeps leaves and avian predators out of the pond.

Christie said that he has talked with Bass Pro Shops in Concord and the N.C. Aquarium at Roanoke Island about putting his crappie on public display, but he has some reservations, particularly if his fish were to be housed with other species.

"I don't want him to end up in the belly of some big catfish," he said of his adopted crappie. "If I am fairly assured he wouldn't be eaten, I'd like to give him to an aquarium for people to see."

To that end, Christie is continuing to care for the fish, growing him until he could fend for himself should he end up in a large aquarium setting.

But don't think his little buddy has made Christie go soft on crappies. He has invested too much for that.

Over the past 20 years, Christie, a retired facility maintenance technician with GlaxoSmithKline, has submerged about 30 brush piles in Kerr Lake, each year sweetening more productive sites with discarded Christmas trees.

With a lake house at Kerr and his wife Bobbie, a motivational humorist, on the road much of the time with her job, Christie spends "three or four days a week" on the water, usually at Kerr but also at Falls Lake "when it has water in it."

"I hope I catch another yellow one, but I don't expect I will," he said. "If the weather's pretty I just might go in the morning."

Perhaps he has a little gold fever.