There are some pretty big pike in Lochleven; I lately examined a very large one, weighing sixteen pounds, that had been feeding very industriously on the dainty trout of the loch. As every angler knows, the pike affords capital sport, and may be taken in many different ways. Pike spawn in March and April, when the fish leaves its hiding-place in the deep water and retires for procreative purposes into shallow creeks or ditches. The pike yields a very large quantity of roe on the average, and the young fish are not long in being hatched. Endowed with great feeding power, pike grow rapidly from the first, attaining a length of twenty-two inches. Before that period a young pike is called a jack, and its increase of weight is at the rate of about four pounds a year when well supplied with food. The appetite of this fish is very great, and, from its being so fierce, it has been called the pirate of the rivers. It is not easily satisfied with food, and numerous extraordinary stories of the pike’s powers of eating and digesting have been from time to time related. I remember, when at school at Haddington (seventeen miles from Edinburgh), of seeing a pike that inhabited a hole in the “Lang Cram” (a part of the river Tyne), which was nearly triangular in shape, supposed to be the exact pattern of its hiding-place, and which devoured every kind of fish or animal that came in its way. It was caught several times, but always managed to escape, and must have weighed at least twenty-five pounds. Upon one occasion it was hooked by a little boy, who fished for it with a mouse, when it rewarded him for his cleverness by dragging him into the water; and had help not been at hand the boy would assuredly have been drowned, as the water at that particular spot was deep. As to the voracity of this fish many particulars have been given. Mr. Jesse, in one of his works, says that a pike of the weight of five pounds has been known to eat a hundred gudgeon in three weeks; and I have myself seen them killed in the neighbourhood of a shoal of parr, and, notwithstanding their rapidity of digestion, I have seen four or five fish taken out of the stomach of each. Mr. Stoddart, one of our chief angling authorities, has calculated the pike to be amongst the most deadly enemies of the infant salmon. He tells us that the pike of the Teviot, a tributary of the Tweed, are very fond of eating young smolts, and says that, in a stretch of water ten miles long, where there is good feeding, there will be at least a thousand pike, and that these during a period of sixty days will consume about a quarter of a million of young salmon!