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 cant 

 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 



