CASTING FOR GREAT PIKE 



and throat are literally packed with partly digested 

 and undigested "garden hackle." I doubt very much 

 if, pound for pound and inch for inch, the great pike 

 is more of a gourmand than some more highly appre- 

 ciated game fish. To the charge that he is a born 

 murderer, a sort of ichthyic degenerate, I can only 

 reiterate that I am somewhat skeptical. Always re- 

 member that it requires several pounds of other fish 

 to make one pound of pike. Few of us would exchange 

 twenty pounds of brook trout, say, for one pound of 

 great pike; that would not be an even exchange, there- 

 fore robbery. 



I once knew a private trout pond, devoted to the 

 propagation of rainbow and eastern trout, in which 

 the fish were apparently doing well. Two years after 

 stocking, I myself took two-pound rainbow from its 

 waters. Then it was noticed that the trout seemed 

 less numerous, fewer and fewer were taken by ardent 

 anglers, until at last a rise was unknown. Then the 

 pond was drained and thirteen lusty great pike were 

 found, but no trout. Some boys had liberated a few 

 "pickerel" minnows, not over four inches long, into 

 the feed stream "just to see them swim," and they 

 had swum right down into the trout pond, a location 

 they found very much to their liking. 



One summer I captured a number of "pickerel" 

 minnows (they were true great pike, I afterwards dis- 

 covered) and confined them in a tank for the purpose 

 of study. Though the little fellows were fed regularly, 

 were supplied with all the food they could eat, they 

 just would attack one another. Once a minnow had 

 secured a grip on a fellow minnow, he would hang on 

 with bulldog tenacity, not letting go until he had 



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