A word of advice after the foregoing illustrations of the danger of getting in front of a swimming bear is hardly now necessary, but one cannot impress too forcibly the danger in attacking a bear by a frontal move. Always approach a bear in the water either on one side or from the rear. You can paddle up quite close to a bear in the direction he is swimming without the least particle of danger, and a more vital and telling spot to fire at cannot be got than the back and base of the skull. CHAPTER XXIX. 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.