4 ANGLING FOR PIKE. 



Pike are anything but vegetarians. During infancy they 

 feed on worms, small fry, and the ordinary coarse fish-food, 

 but after the first year there is no fish of swallowable size 

 safe from their attack : the young of waterfowl — and not unf re- 

 quently the old birds too — rats, mice, and, in fact, every living 

 thing that moves on or in the water, which is not too large, will 

 serve them as a meal. Some things they naturally like better 

 than others. Tench they certainly do not like, but, at the 

 same time, will occasionally eat them.* Perch, which many 

 writers have asserted to be too prickly for a pike to swallow, 

 are in some places used as a bait without the back fin being 

 removed. I once opened a jack weighing about 51b. which 

 had in its interior no less than four perch of between ^Ib. and 

 ilb. each. Occasionally a good-sized pike will condescend to 

 a worm, and I have twice caught small ones on cheese when 

 fishing for chub with Nottingham tackle. There are fairly 

 well authenticated instances of pike rising at swallows 

 skimming the surface of the water, and an Irishman told 

 me he lost a snipe which fell into the water, and was seized 

 by a pike before his dog could reach it. Once I took a 

 small pike on a lake trout-fly, but this was in very shallow 

 water. I shall, of course, have more to say concerning the 

 favourite food of these fish when I come to the subject of baits. 



I have already hinted at the voracity of pike. When really 

 hungry they will stick at nothing. Often and often has 

 the indiscriminating fish seized the live-bait angler's gaudily- 

 coloured cork float, and ignored the less noticeable but more 

 toothsome fish-bait swimming only a few feet beneath it. 

 Boys have been attacked when bathing, horses seized by the 

 nose when drinking, and even the wily fox has been caught 

 by the still more wily pike. Ah me, what good stories has 

 his pikeship afforded us ! Some of them are true, most 

 are not; but they one and all create amusement, and some- 



* In the Fishing Gazette of 23rd Jan., 1886, Mr. Richardson, of Grantham, 

 stated that he had recently taken a pike weighing 231b. lOoz. on a jib. tench. Mr. 

 Jardine tells me that Saunders, the well-known taxidermist, took from the bellies 

 of three pike, which weighed 601b., several large tench weighing between 21b. and 

 31b. each. The pike were taken at Kingsfleet, where there is little else but 

 tench for them to eat. 



