PIKE-TACKLE. 29 



sharp. They have also been supposed by old writers to be 

 poisonous, but the truth is, probably, that, like all punctured 

 wounds, the injuries they inflict heal very slowly and painfully. 

 A disgorger of some sort becomes, therefore a necessity for 

 every pike-fisher, and especially for the spinner, as he incurs a 

 double danger from the multiplicity of his own hooks. I shall 

 not forget in a hurry an incident which occurred to myself 

 when fishing some years ago in the beautiful waters of Sir 

 Edward Hulse, below Braemore, on the Hampshire Avon. 

 By a great exertion of agility I had just succeeded, after 

 making a cast from an ' impossible ' standpoint, in conducting to 

 the side, and thence lifting by the gills up to the top of the bank, 

 a pike of some five or six pounds weight. In the position in 

 which I had balanced myself when casting, the chances had 

 been about equally divided between my pulling him out and 

 his pulling me in. In the excitement, perhaps, of the just 

 terminated struggle, I attempted to extract the flight from his 

 mouth without using a disgorger. The first hook came out all 

 right, but the second, just when I had got it clear, was struck, 

 by a sudden wrench of the pike under my knee, clean into and 

 half through the top of the middle finger of my right hand — 

 the flight still remaining attached to the pike by the big tail hook ! 

 The only chance of freeing myself from my de facto captor 

 now lay in the untried possibilities of my left hand. At every 

 plunge of the pike the hook in my finger went in deeper ; and 

 it was only by a desperate effort that I at last succeeded in 

 wrenching off the penknife attached to my watch chain, the 

 blade of which I opened with my teeth, and severed the gimp 

 below the hook which had got me. It still remained, left- 

 handed, to break off the hook — one of a triangle— from its 

 shank, which I did with the pair of pliers I always carry in my 

 troUing-case, and finally with the said pliers to force it through 

 the finger and so out point foremost at the other side. ... On 

 this occasion I recorded a mental vow against the employment 

 of digital disgorgers for the future ! 



If, in spite of precautions, the fisherman should, by the 



