4 THE PIKE. 



head and neck under the water; the circumstances seemed 

 so pecuHar that a boat was procured, and on proceeding to 

 the spot it was discovered that a pike had swallowed the 

 head of the swan, which was firmly fixed in his throat, and 

 being unable to extricate themselves from this extraordinary 

 difficulty the pair of them were dead." I should not suppose 

 the pike opened his ponderous jaws with intent to swallow 

 the swan altogether ; perhaps he only saw the head and neck 

 deep down in the water, and had not noticed the body 

 attached. Anyhow, for once in a way he had made a fatal 

 mistake. Another anecdote mentions a pike seizing the lips 

 of a mule that had gone to the edge of the lake to drink ; 

 and still another historian puts on record that a pike 

 seized the foot of a Polish woman who had stepped into a 

 stream. But we can hardly take these statements seriously, 

 for, personally, when I have got into close quarters with 

 pike, and peered ever so cautiously through the flags and 

 rushes at them, as soon as ever my eyes met the wicked- 

 looking ones of the fish, like a flash of light he would vanish, 

 and leave scarcely a ripple behind. Once, however, I saw 

 a 41b. jack maul the hand of a keeper badly, and the 

 strangest part of the story was that the jack had been out 

 of the water nearly two hours. After packing up the rods 

 and tackle, the keeper threw the fish out of the boat on to 

 the grassy bank, and some few minutes afterwards stooped 

 down to pick it up again, when, to our utter astonishment, 

 as soon as his hand neared the jack it made a sudden grab 

 and seized him by the thick part of his thumb, inflicting 

 some nasty cuts, which were weeks before they healed up. 

 The keeper said he was served the same trick once before, 

 only that time he had got the fish home, and was going to 

 remove then\from a pump trough after washing, when one 

 collared him in the same way. This was the painful experi- 

 ence of Harry Rout, the then keeper of the Huntingdon 

 Angling Society's water, and the memory of that wounded 

 hand haunts me to this day, and causes me to impress most 

 strongly on the young pike fisher that on no account must 

 he put his hands too near the jaws of a jack, for if he does 

 get operated on with those horrible teeth, he will most likely 

 remember it for the rest of his natural life. Be very careful 



