Untitled - RB-Flys

6 PIKE AND OTHER COARSE FISH.
Nothing that swims, or walks, or flies does he spare when his
appetite is whetted by the sharp wind sweeping
The half-frozen dyke,
That hungers into madness every plunging pike.
Woe be to his children, or his brother, mother, or cousin,
grandchildren or great-grandchildren, should they
cross his
path ; and I have not the slightest doubt, speaking ichthyo-
phageously, if not ichthyologically, that under sufficient provocation
he would tackle one of his own ancestors, even to the
third and fourth generation. This is all '
and is in
thorough,'
keeping with the grim muzzle and steely grey eyes which fix
upon the observer with unwinking and ferocious glare. The
very rush and flash with which he takes his prey
has in it a
fascination, and I have more than once seen a man drop his
rod from sheer fright when a pike, that has been stealthily
following his bait, suddenly dashes at it by the side of the boat
or at the moment it is being lifted out of water.
The pike, I am happy to is
say, daily rising in the estimation
of anglers as a game and, in the largest sense of the word,
sporting fish. This is partly owing, no doubt, to the difficulty,
with an ever-increasing army of anglers, of obtaining decent
trout or, still more, salmon fishing (in fact, a good salmon river
has now r become almost as expensive a luxury as a grouse moor
or a deer forest), and partly also because the art is now pursued
with greatly improved appliances.
We live in times in which, as I observed in the first page of
the first pamphlet I ever wrote on jack-fishing, no 'well in-
formed pike is to be ensnared by such simple devices as those
which proved fatal to his progenitors in the good old days of
innocence and Izaak Walton, and were we now to sally forth
with the trolling gear bequeathed to us by our great grand-
fathers of lamented memory, we should expect to see every
pike from John o' Groat's to Land's End rise up to repel with
scorn the insult offered them. No !
depend
upon
dwellers in what Tom Hood called the '
Eely places '
it the
have