THE PIKE 169 
hook, with the barbs deeply embedded on either side, so as 
completely to bar the passage of food. The wretched creature 
must have died eventually of starvation, yet it came gallantly at 
the spinning-bait. 
In further illustration of the pike’s voracity, one other 
deserves to be cited, though of a very familiar type, because 
it has been so well authenticated. In April, 1870, two boatmen 
on Loch Tay, noticing a disturbance in the water, rowed to the 
spot and saw two fish, which they supposed were fighting. 
With a single stroke of the gaff, both fish were drawn into 
the boat, when it was found that they were a brace of pike, 
weighing together 1g lb. and nearly equal in size. The head 
of one was firmly fixed as far as the pectoral fins within the 
jaws and gullet of the other. A cast of this singular pair is, or 
used to be, in the Buckland Museum at South Kensington. 
Pike are equally at home in lakes and in rivers; and 
albeit they prefer the steadier and slower parts of streams, yet 
they can maintain their station in pretty strong water. They 
spawn in spring, the season in Britain varying from the middle 
of March to the middle of May, according to temperature 
and elevation. The ova are reddish-yellow, rather large, 
but smaller than, and not unlike, those of the Salmonide. 
Buckland counted the eggs within a female pike taken with rod 
and line from the Norfolk Broads in April, 1870. This fish 
measured 3 ft. 8 in. in length, and weighed 32 Ib. ; the ovary 
weighed 5 lb. and contained 595,200 eggs. Ina pike measur- 
ing 3 ft. 7 in. and weighing 28 lb., taken in Loch Awe during 
the previous October, the roe weighed only 21 oz., and 
contained 292,320 eggs. Thus the roe of the larger fish 
weighed nearly four times as much as that of the smaller fish, 
though it contained only twice as many eggs ; which, of course, 
is explained by the greater development of the eggs on the eve 
of spawning. Unlike the salmon, which usually undergoes 
long periods of abstinence before spawning, and nourishes its 
roe at the expense of its muscular tissues, pike continue to eat 
