No fish is so “coy and hard to please” as the pike. Of them may be said, what someone has said of women,
If they will, they will,
You may depend on’t;
And if they won’t, they won’t;
And there’s an end on’t.
The proverbial “variabile semper” element is their characteristic feature, a living illustration of a line, pregnant with meaning, of Coleridge,
Naught may endure but mutability.
On one occasion, a well-known angler tells me, he fished three long hours in a gale of wind, which nearly carried him into the river, without stirring a fin, and then, an unaccountable change of mood coming over the “water wolves,” through the next hour and a half they “took like mad,” and he landed 42½lb. weight. At the time two Sheffield men were fishing close by, who had been at the work for three days, and had landed only a few bream or roach, and one small jack. Under their very noses he landed three splendid pike, while they looked on thunderstruck. Such are the fortunes of war with fishermen. On another occasion, when the day was dull and calm, and there was nothing, one would have thought, to stir the fish to any animation, he landed at the same spot one pike of 16¼lb., and three of 9lb. odd each. “In fact,” he says, “pike are unaccountable.” In December,
1898, a boy caught a pike of 16lb. weight in the Horncastle Canal, at Tattershall, 3½ feet in length and 9 inches in girth; and another of 11lbs. was taken in the Witham, shortly after; and other cases of 14lb., and so on, are recorded. Pike, as is well known, are exceedingly voracious, and not very particular as to what they eat. A writer in the “Naturalist” [78] states that a pair of Shoveller ducks nested in a disused brickpit, and brought off their young; but a pike in the pit gradually carried them off, one by one, taking one when it was large enough to fly. The same fish destroyed nearly the whole of another brood of ducks, hatched at the same pit. The present writer has himself witnessed a similar occurrence. He at one time kept (as he does still) wild ducks, which nested on the banks of the moat surrounding the house. There were large pike in the moat, and he has frequently heard a duck give a quack of alarm, has seen a curl on the water, and on counting his ducklings, found that there was one less. And if pike are not particular as to their diet—all being grist that comes to the mill—neither are they particular as to the bait, if they are in the humour.
The writer, in a day’s fishing for trout, in a Scotch river, the Teviot, where he took perhaps a score or two in the day, would vary the sport on coming to a deep pool by taking off his flies, putting on stout gimp tackle, with a single large hook, which was run through the body of a small trout, or parr; and would often, in this way, land a good pike or two. Sometimes when drawing in the pike too hastily, it would disgorge the bait and hook, but on his making another cast, and letting them float down the pool again, the pike would return to the charge, unwarned by experience, and be eventually captured. On one occasion, rowing leisurely in a boat on Loch Vennachar, with his rod over the stern, and line trailing behind him, a trout, of a pound weight or so, took the fly, and hooked itself. This was immediately seized by a good-sized pike, and after a hard fight he secured both with gut tackle. Dining with the Marchioness who owned the above river, he was regaled on a 10lb. or 12lb. pike, which the Lady Cecil had caught that day, her boat being pushed along the river by a gillie, himself walking in the water, and she fishing with a single large hook, baited with a piece of red cloth.
We have quoted the lines celebrating the pike of the Witham, and the eels of the Ancholme
(also a Lincolnshire river), but eels were, at one time, abundant also in the Witham. Large tubs containing hundreds of them used to be taken to Horncastle on market days, or were hawked about to the country houses. It is said that as many as 16,000 eels have been taken in one year. If you bought eels from these hawkers, they were brought to your kitchen door alive, and, being difficult creatures to handle, your cook generally got the seller to skin them alive, and they were often put into the pan for stewing before they had ceased wriggling. Hence the phrase to “get accustomed to a thing; as eels do to skinning.” But an eel can only be once skinned in its life, and even the skin, stript from its writhing body, was supposed to possess a “virtue.” If tied round a leg or an arm, it was considered a remedy, or preventive, for rheumatism; and your cook would sometimes preserve the skin for a rheumatic friend. In these days the eels brought to market are few, and not half the size they used to be. Eels, from 2ft. to 3ft. long, and as thick as one’s wrist, were formerly quite common. Eels are supposed to migrate to the sea, and, in the year 1903, a large eel was found, early in the morning, about 100 yards from a large pond, in the parish of Wispington, travelling across a grass field, towards a stream, by which it might eventually reach the sea.
The only other fish which I have to remark upon is the trout. They are not found in the Witham; but the Bain trout are handsome; both the golden, or rich yellow kind, with pink spots, and the purple or mauve-coloured variety, but the former are much finer in flavour. For some years the swans on the Horncastle Canal made great havoc among the young trout and spawn [79a] in the neighbouring river Bain, but the last swan died in 1897. Further, there is now an artificial breeding tank established at Horncastle, managed by Mr. Rushton, for keeping up the supply. Some very fine fish have been taken at different times. My notes record as follows:—In April, 1896, one of the anglers already referred to [79b] caught a trout in the Bain, close to Horncastle, weighing 4lb. 6oz., 23in. in length. The same fisherman, in July, 1888, took another, within half a mile of the same place, weighing 4lb. 10oz., 23in. in length. The son [79c] of a quondam veteran angler,