VORACIOUS PIKE.
Calling the pike the fresh water shark is a name well applied, for he
is bold and anything that comes his way is food for his maw. It is a
known fact to those who have studied its habits that he will eat
frogs, young ducks, musquash, in fact, anything that happens to be in
front of him, not even barring his own offspring. How destructive
they are in a trout or whitefish lake is well known.
One of the lakes on which I was stationed years ago was said to have
been, formerly, good for whitefish, but was now almost nude of this
staple food of the dwellers at the post, brought about by the
increasing number of pike.
As I was likely to be in charge, for a few years at least, I set to
work to destroy these marauders. The lake is only a mile and a half
long by a quarter broad. It discharges into a large river by a
shallow creek, but, by this creek, no doubt, many pike were added to
the number at each spawning time.
The creek took my attention first, and we staked it from side to side
with pickets six feet high and planted them about two inches apart.
At the back or river side of this barrier we kept some old, almost
useless, nets set continuously. They were doubled so that no small
sized pike could pass. This was done during the low water in August.
My next move was to employ every boy, girl and old woman about the
post trolling for pike. We supplied them with the trolls and lines
and paid them a cent apiece for every pike over a foot long.
During this trolling process we kept some nets of large mesh, set
purposely for the bigger ones. For days and weeks there must have
been landed on an average a hundred a day, and yet they came.
As most of the pay was taken out in cheap "bullseyes" at a cent
apiece, the real outlay in money was not considerable.
The following spring we inaugurated another system of warfare against
the pests, and that was by paddling quietly around the bays and
shooting them while they lay spawning and basking in the sun and
shallow water.
Often three or four would be clustered together. A shot would not
kill the whole, but it would stun them so we could finish them with
the paddle.
One that was killed in this way measured thirty-nine inches long and
weighed thirty-five pounds. A fish of this size was good eating, and
therefore used at the post.
The small, slimy ones, however, were burned in numbers on a brush
heap.
With such persistent and continued onslaught on our part, at the end
of the first year their numbers were very noticeably decreased, and
at the close of the following summer they were positively scarce, and
a very welcome number of whitefish stocked our lake in their place.
I resided at that post for twelve years, and we were never in want of
the finest fish for the post's consumption.
Before closing this sketch I must tell one anecdote about a pike,
even if I lay myself open to be disbelieved by the reader. I am well
aware that fish stories stand in bad repute and the veracity of the
narrator doubted. The following is positively true and came under my
notice:
Years before the foregoing part of my story happened I was stationed
on the height of land north of Lake Superior, and one afternoon
portaged my canoe over into a small chain of beaver lakes hunting for
signs.
It was a "still, calm day," as some high-flown writer would put it.
A feather dropped would have fallen straight to the earth.
I was paddling very quietly out into the lake from the portage when I
noticed something moving very gently on the surface a few yards ahead
of the canoe. Getting closer I made this out to be the fin of some
fish moving sluggishly. Pushing the canoe further in advance with
noiseless knife strokes of the paddle, I got close enough to see it
was a pike with a whitefish half protruding from its mouth and almost
dead from suffocation.
This, I thought, is a rare occurrence for a person to witness, and
gently reaching out my hand I inserted my thumb and finger into the
eye sockets and lifted both into the canoe.
On getting ashore at the next portage I forced open the jaws of the
pike, and the whitefish dropped from them. The half that had been
inside the pike's mouth was quite decomposed, while the part out in
the water was comparatively fresh.
In trying to swallow this fish, which was two-thirds the pike's own
length, he had distended his jaws to the utmost, but they only opened
enough to reach near the back fin, and here fixing his teeth in
savage fury the biter had bitten more than he could eat. He was
equally unable to disgorge himself as he was incapable of swallowing,
and thus by his greediness he brought on his doom.
Noticing his stomach was in a distended shape caused me to rip it
open with my knife, and out tumbled the remains of a smaller
whitefish, almost quite digested, which had been swallowed whole and
would have measured nearly a foot long.
It was gluttony and not hunger that caused him to reach an untimely
end, a moral for greedy little boys.