THE PIKE 171 
in 1862, when my father spent £3,000 in draining Dowalton 
Loch, the largest sheet of water in Wigtownshire. Legends of 
huge pike inhabiting its depths had ever been current in the 
neighbourhood, but, strange to say, among thousands of pike 
and perch captured when the waters ran off, there was no fish 
taken of a greater weight than 12 lb. It was supposed that 
the larger fish had been smothered and lost in ‘some hundreds 
of acres of mud laid bare. 
Pike lend themselves readily to the fisherman’s proverbial 
appetite for the marvellous. I once asked an old gillie of 
mine, usually very laconic, whether there were pike in a 
certain loch. 
‘* Pike!” he exclaimed, with a ring of sarcasm in his voice. 
I had touched the spring of his loquacity, for he proceeded— 
‘* Ae day I was gangin’ along the side o’ yon loch, an’ I see’d a 
thing in the watter, I thocht it was a tree. An’ then I saw twa 
e’en in it.” 
“And what was it, Sandy ?”’ said I. 
‘“€Oh, it was a pike,” quoth he. 
“ And what did you do, Sandy?” 
“<1 gaed back from the loch for fear of him!” 
Then, with the craft of a true artist, he fell silent. Words 
could do no more. I could not induce him to hazard an 
estimate of the weight of this great fish ; but it must have 
been vast, for never, before or since that time, did I ever hear 
Sandy say so much about anything. 
In 1897 the late Lord Inverurie addressed an enquiry 
through the Fishing Gazete into the authentic records of large 
pike taken within recent times in the British Islands. Mr. 
Alfred Jardine, a well-known authority upon pike-fishing, 
furnished the following list, of which he considered the details 
“beyond dispute.” It will be noticed that, although more 
large pike are reported from Ireland than from Great Britain, 
only five Irish captures are included in Mr. Jardine’s catalogue, 
owing to the difficulty of verifying the details. None are 
