142 VORACITY OF PIKE. [CHAP. iv. 



by dragging him into the water ; and had help not been at 

 hand the boy would assuredly have been drowned, as the 

 water at that particular spot was deep. As to the voracity of 

 this fish many particulars have been given. Mr. Jesse, in 

 one of his works, says that a pike of the weight of five pounds 

 has been known to eat a hundred gudgeon in three weeks ; 

 and I have myself seen them killed in the neighbourhood 

 of a shoal of parr, and, notwithstanding their rapidity of diges- 

 tion, I have seen four or five fish taken out of the stomach of 

 each. Mr. Stoddart, one of our chief angling authorities, has 

 calculated the pike to be amongst the most deadly enemies 

 of the infant salmon. He tells us that the pike of the Teviot, 

 a tributary of the Tweed, are very fond of eating young sinolts, 

 and says that, in a stretch of water ten miles long, where there 

 is good feeding, there will be at least a thousand pike, and 

 that these during a period of sixty days will consume about a 

 quarter of a million of young salmon ! 



One would almost suppose that some of the stories about 

 the voracity of pike had been invented ; if only half of them 

 be true, this fish has certainly well earned its title of shark of 

 the fresh water. There is, for instance, the well-known tale of 

 the poor mule, which a pike was seen to take by the nose and 

 pull into the water ; but it is more likely I think that the 

 mule pulled out the pike. Pennant, however, relates a story of 

 a pike that is known to be true. On the Duke of Sutherland's 

 Canal at Trentham, a pike seized the head of a swan that was 

 feeding under water, and gorged as much of it as killed both. 

 A servant, perceiving the swan with its head below the sur- 

 face for a longer time than usual, went to see what was wrong, 

 and found both swan and pike dead. A large pike, if it has the 

 chance, will think nothing of biting its captor ; there are seve- 

 ral authentic instances of this having been done. The pike is 

 a long-lived fish, grows to a large size, and attains a prodigious 

 weight. There is a narrative extant about one that was said 



