A long fishing line with many shorter lines and hooks attached to it (usually suspended between buoys)

Usage examples of trotline.

I wanted to drive deep into the Atchafalaya Swamp, past the confines of reason, into the past, into a world of lost dialects, gator hunters, busthead whiskey, moss harvesters, Jax beer, trotline runners, moonshiners, muskrat trappers, cockfights, bloodred boudin, a jigger of Jim Beam lowered into a frosted schooner of draft, outlaw shrimpers, dirty rice black from the pot, hogmeat cooked in rum, Pearl and Regal and Grand Prize and Lone Star iced down in washtubs, crawfish boiled with cob corn and artichokes, all of it on the tree-flooded, alluvial rim of the world, where the tides and the course of the sun were the only measures of time.

We worked in relative silence, monosyllables, for the first two trotlines, Bill beheading them with such fervor that twice he got the cleaver stuck in the wood.

I set out a dozen at a time, upright, spaced evenly for the trotlines, then turn them on and wait.

Even Marygay and I never spoke of it, not even when we were tending the trotlines, alone out on the ice.

He would take them out on the water to run the trotlines and crawdad traps, fish for catfish and trout and alligator gar and just about anything else they could wrestle aboard a rickety pirogue, including alligators when the game warden wasn't in the parish.