THE PIKE 167 
‘““My dear boy,” the old sinner may be represented as 
mumbling, with his mouth full, “if I had only known, nothing 
would have induced me to touch you! My eyes are not so 
good as they were ; I had not the slightest idea it was you. It 
is enough to break your old dad’s heart ; but you see I can’t 
let you go ; so lie still, I pray, and it will soon be over.” 
That sounds all very well, at least it might do so were 
there anything extraordinary in such a circumstance. But jack 
are found too constantly in the interior of their relatives to 
justify the hypothesis of accident. I myself have seen two 
—one fresh, the other half digested—in the stomach of one 
moderately-sized pike. Unsparing of his own kind, the pike 
is relentless in his persecution of other living creatures. It is 
pitiful to see a mother wild duck going afloat on a spring 
morning with a string of a dozen or so of plump little 
ducklings, and to watch the bevy dwindle day by day, until 
at last but one, or at most a pair, remains. So with salmon 
smolts. These little fellows put on their silvery sea-jackets 
in spring and begin dropping down the rivers in shoals. 
If there are pike in the stream, as is too often the case in 
salmon rivers, the proportion of valuable fish destroyed is 
simply incalculable. In May last year (1901) I was fishing 
a favourite salmon-cast, the only bit of swiftish water in a 
sluggish stretch of two or three miles, wherein pike do greatly 
abound. Just as my fly came to the very spot for a spring 
fish, the line tightened bravely. “In him!” I ejaculated 
mentally ; but next moment a wretched little jack of some 
three pounds was floundering on the surface. I dragged 
it ashore, put further mischief out of its power with a rap on 
the head, and had the curiosity to open it to ascertain what it 
contained. The ovaries were full of ripe spawn, almost ready 
to be shed, and in the stomach were two beautiful silvery 
smolts—potential twenty-pounders—swallowed within fifteen 
minutes of the death of their captor. Now, methought, within 
these three miles of water there must be, at the very lowest 
