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.