MUSKELLUNGE AND ARTIFICIAL LURES 



characterized as 'pike day." I refer now to those 

 mean, mizzling portentous days when the swine make 

 shift at building nests and the barometer seeks the 

 bottom of the glass. With the barometric conditions 

 just right — which are all wrong — I have found the 

 hours from eight to eleven the most successful for the 

 muskellunge fisherman. A man may spend a whole 

 month on a pike lake and never find just those condi- 

 tions; but should he, he is elected to spend a few hours 

 in an ichthyic paradise. 



Several years ago I was spending three days on a 

 locally famous lake in North Minnesota, more bent 

 upon securing photographs and certain habit data than 

 fish. But upon arising one morning I discovered that 

 all nature shouted aloud of an oncoming atmospheric 

 disturbance of some sort. Parenthetically: I have 

 always been peculiarly susceptible to atmospheric in- 

 fluences. Often a very devil of unrest seems to possess 

 me before the breaking of a midsummer thunderstorm. 

 The more fearsome the tempest, the greater the fore- 

 warning physical disturbance. On the morning in 

 question I left the camera in the tent, and alone with 

 rod, reel, and case of under- water lures, set out upon 

 the lake. We have it on no less authority than 

 Kipling that at times trout are "jumping crazy for 

 the fly." Be that as it may as regards trout, for two 

 hours the muskellunge of that lake had lost all their 

 shyness and moroseness. They were literally wild to 

 take my lures. While as a rule the fish run small — 

 under two feet — I took four good ones, one of which 

 weighed thirteen pounds. Let him explain it who can, 

 I only know that the hours preceding a summer 

 thunderstorm are good hours, liable to be "high 



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