pike pole

noun, Cdn., a long pole with a sharp point and hook, used for moving floating logs (COD); used on Wolfe Island as a multipurpose tool

“The baby floated in the blanket and the ice, and I don’t know who it was now. It’s so long ago. They took a pike pole — I still have my father’s pike pole — that helped us pull. And that pike pole should really be going to the Historical Society.”

“They had to stay in the boat and then you have these poles, with a steel thing on the end. You call them pike poles. And if the ice got bad, you jumped in the boat, and then you used these poles with the hook on, that you could kind of grab the ice and kind of pull yourself up on the ice again, eh.”

“They trucked them [logs] in, and they had a pond … Somebody, like, just poked them with a pike pole. I don’t know how they kept the pond open but they must have had something in it.”

“We put them all up with pike poles then.”

“Now what we have done high in the tree, we’ve taken a long pike pole and shook the limb. But if you don’t get the queen [bee], they go right back up again.”