He told us that a few days before he had netted one much larger, which he had given to his dogs to eat.
To prove the truth of his statement he hunted around the bush, found the trout’s head and brought it to us. We measured it with the head of our own fish. It was, more or less, twice as large.
Muskellunge up to forty pounds are common in the big lakes. Some are bigger. These fish, when hungry, are vicious and often go for quarry which they can hardly swallow.
A squirrel swimming across a river is snapped up like a minnow. So are young ducklings, if they venture too far out from shore. In several instances we have seen a much larger bird successfully pulled down by a big pickerel.
Last summer when paddling near a small island on Bear Lake, we noticed three young gulls take fright, leave their nest on the rocks, and swim directly away from us. They were full grown, although they had not yet learned how to fly.
One of those gulls was pulled down three times in front of us by a muskellunge. Each time it remained under water almost a minute. The fish finally gave it up as a bad job; but we marvelled at the endurance of that young bird. It did not seem the worse for its submarine encounter.
Tale XXV: A Little Indian Girl
Railways may extend their lines far away in the north; civilization may wipe out huge slices of wilderness; the remaining Indians, in spite of all their faults intensified by the contact with white men, are still at heart wild men whose sole aim in life is to hunt and to kill.
Whatever may be their calling, there is one thing which no Indian man, woman or child can resist. It’s to try to lay low big game. In other words, to try to secure red meat each time the occasion arises.