Every small boy knows about pike. They are huge and fierce and will attack anything that swims. Their jaws are lined with teeth that all curve inwards, giving anything that gets into them a silky-smooth entry and no way back. If you land one, they have these marble-cold eyes that follow you around the bank, even when the fish is dead.

Older pike hands may be less wide-eyed, but even the most experienced treats Esox lucius with respect. They have all heard the stories. They all know that hungry pike are voracious. They all know that pike will attempt to swallow fish as big as themselves whole, and that two have often been found dead together, the gagged jaws of one jammed over the head of another. Even witnesses to events like these, though, are likely to treat the more outlandish pike stories – such as attacks on animals and humans – with a studied wink-wink and a say-no-more.

Certainly I did, until a few days ago. Then, at a friend’s drinks party, the subject of fishing came up. “I don’t know anything about fishing”, a lady named Louise Jones chipped in, “but I do know about pike because one attacked me.” I laughed and eyed the wine in her near-empty glass. “Of course it did,” I joked, “they attack people all the time. Can’t go near the water in some places for fear of being attacked by a pike”.

“I’m serious – look,” Louise said. She held her hand to the light and there, down the middle finger of her left hand, was a long, fine scar. “A pike did that”. Bill, her husband spoke up to confirm it. There was no doubt that their story was true.

On a hot summer’s day in the mid-1980s, the two of them went for a row on a boating pool at Alexandra Palace, in North London. Bill was on the oars and Louise was lying back, trailing her hand in the water in best romantic fashion. Suddenly there was a swirl at the surface and in the same instant Louise felt a searing pain. She instinctively jerked up her arm and a sizeable pike was half-lifted from the water. It thrashed briefly, then fell off. Her finger had been cut to the bone. There was, Bill said, “blood everywhere”.

After hearing the story I called Fred Buller, British angling’s great historian and a world authority on pike. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I’m not surprised at that. Anglers throw all kinds of lures into the water in the hope that pike will attack them. A hand trailing in the water could easily trigger a predatory response. A fish would see the hand but not the arm. I suspect that kind of thing happens more often than we think.”

The exchange sent me back to my books on this extraordinary fish - and in particular to Buller’s Pike and the Pike Angler. There, I dug out again reports of the pike’s catholic tastes and this time read them with a less leery eye.

On November 27, 1943, a Captain T. G. Wells, of Beechville, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, had a letter published in The Field about an 18-pounder he had caught. The fish, he wrote, had “swallowed a heron, not quite fully-grown”.

On January 23, 1959, Angling Times reported the capture of a 28lb pike from Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland. That fish was said to contain five fully-fledged moorhens. On April 17, 1920, Fishing Gazette reported that a pike had been seen to jump out of the water five times, each time plucking a swallow off a low, overhanging bough. Buller records one account – there must be many more – of a pike seizing a swan’s head while the bird was rummaging below water for food: with the bird’s head in the pike’s throat, the swan drowned and the fish choked.

Worse was to come. In 1922, The Field carried a report about a 14lb pike caught at Newbury on February 19 that year. The fish had an entire newborn pig in its stomach.

In September 1813, another magazine reported that passers-by walking on the shore of Lake Windermere heard a calf making extraordinary noises. On approaching the animal, they saw that a large pike was hanging from its nose. The fish had apparently seized hold as the calf was drinking.

In his Rural Sports (1801), the Rev W. B. Daniel reported a similar incident, except that this time the creature involved was a mule. In the same book, the Rev Daniel reports that in 1798 two anglers on a pond near Warnham, Sussex, saw a pike weighing upwards of seven pounds seize a dog that was lapping at the water. The fish was landed by holding on to the dog, “to the astonishment of the fishermen”.

Nearer to hand, as my friend Louise might say, is an account in a Reading newspaper of an incident that occurred in May1868. A small boy at a pond outside the town had waded in barefoot while fishing. After a while his companions heard a scream, saw him topple sideways into the water and begin thrashing about. On going to his aid they saw a large pike hanging on to the floundering boy’s foot. They managed to grab him and pull him to shore, driving the pike away with stones.

With the known certainty of the attack on Louise’s hand, these and other ancient accounts, long swallowed with much salt, have been given new credibility. They will all add a frisson for thousands over the next couple of months as the pike fishing season reaches its annual climax. They will certainly add a frisson for me when – unusually – I go pike fishing later this week.

My next-of-kin have been put on alert.

— Brian Clarke’s fishing column appears on the first Monday of each month.

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