VOEACITT 0¥ PIKE. 103 



managed to escape, and must have weighed at least twenty-five 

 pounds. Upon one occasion it was hooked by a little boy, who 

 fished for it with a mouse, when it rewarded him for his clever- 

 ness 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 kUled in the neighbourhood of a shoal of 

 parr, and, notwithstanding their rapidity of digestion, 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 sal- 

 mon. He tells us that the pike of the Teviot, a tributary of 

 the Tweed, are very fond of eating young smolts, 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 puU 

 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 surface 

 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 

 several 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 to be two centuries and a half old, which weighed 

 three hundred and fifty pounds, and was seventeen feet long. 

 There is abundant evidence of the size of pike : "individuals 

 have been captured in Scotland, so we are told in the Scots 

 Magazine, that weighed seventy-nine pounds. In the London 



