Part 10

Grim is standing motionless with her head towards the current, leaving her forked tail to keep her, with slight movements, on the same spot. She is tired and exhausted after her long struggle with the pearly fish, and feeling rather languid and out of sorts. Her lacerated mouth hurts every time she opens it to rinse it with fresh water. She has, therefore, sought shelter in the rocky cave to compose herself and recover.

Something quivers along her breast and cautiously pricks her sides and belly. It must be a waving grass-stalk!

Then a gradually-increasing, continuous pressure is suddenly felt round the thick part of her tail.

With a sudden movement of her body she tries to shake off the supposed reed, but at the same moment the pressure is felt like a bite from the hard, sharp-edged beak of a heron. She struggles and writhes, and warps herself out of the cave; and now she flies, fin-winged, through the water.

Nipper is hanging to her stern. He has only hold with one claw, but hopes to get the other, which he is waving about, also applied. His tail-fan works incessantly.

Grim drags at full speed over stock and stone, and swings him out of one gyration into another; through reed-beds and undergrowth, and far, far into the forest of water-weed; but he hangs on still!

He feels, however, that his prize is rather more than he can manage. There is no time left for him to pick at the fish’s flesh with his other claw; he was growing quite dizzy, for he was not accustomed to going forward at such a pace!

Then he stretches out his free claw to seize hold of a root, and thus try to chain his captive to the bottom.

But the trick does not succeed. The jerk that follows is so violent that he loses his claw!

He has now lost his chance, and lets go.

Grim feeling herself relieved of his weight, and free in her movements, darts away with the speed of a run-away engine. In addition to the soreness of her mouth, she now has a pain in her tail. She will need some time to recover from both.

Things had gone against her, and to tell the truth she did not think there was much fun in being a fish; but then she had to learn her lesson, and once bitten, twice shy, both in and above the water.

The recollection of the strange little pearly fish long remained in her memory. Its stiff body, and continual turning about its own dorsal fin, without a single stroke of the tail, were long imprinted on her mind; and whenever afterwards the “tit-bit” appeared, her wounded mouth assured her voracious stomach that it was wiser to refrain.

VI: THE MAN-ROACH

Years went by; and Grim grew into a splendid fish. Her long, flat forehead was now continued straight into the strong duck-like beak of the upper jaw. A hollow in the middle enabled it, as it were, to project in canopies that hung down over her eyes, which thus acquired an expression even more cruel and scowling.

The cheeks stood perpendicularly on each side of the forehead, and enclosed the cranium as between walls; it was as though she had had a dent on both sides of her head. The back of her neck swelled up like that of a bull, for here the muscles lay over the cranium in large, thick curves, until down by the neck, they gave place each to its branchial cleft, which was as large as a barn door.

And what a mouth! It opened up far past the eyes! Generally, it only stood ajar; but to look into it when it opened wide was like looking into a barrel studded with nails.

In the front of the lower jaw, the teeth stood thick as pins in a pincushion. They were small and pointed, and sloped backwards, so that they served as barbs. In along the sides came the long, widely-separated incisors, whose purpose was to enter into and hold fast the prey. They were more than half an inch in length, rounded and blunt, and resembled the teeth of a rake.

The upper jaw was provided with a far more terrible armature. Whole rows of harrow-like teeth stood out, making a diabolical grater of the palate. They continued far down the throat, and even came forward over the tongue. Woe to the body that became jammed here! It was only released as mince-meat.

But the throat that swallowed the victim was by far the most horrible contrivance.

It resembled the drawn-up mouth of a sack. Down through it lay great rolls of swallowing-muscles, studded with grasping protuberances. In the midst of them the œsophagus was discernible, its aperture incessantly opening and closing with a suction that inexorably drew everything down with it.

And her external equipment corresponded to her internal. The wonderful, dark colours of the shallows drew a broad stripe along her great back. About the forehead and along the back of the neck, the water-grasses had laid a ground-wash of their own deep green; and her sides were veiled by the flickering streaks of the reed-beds. Patches of gold, like the sunshine falling through the glassy surface of the water, shone out between the transverse stripes on her sides; and over the branchial arch and the belly lay the pure whiteness of the water-lily.

Yes, she was adorned in all her splendour. Her scales gleamed with the rays of the sun and moon; and when, with the rapidity of lightning, she made a dart, it seemed like the twinkling of stars in the dark night of the deep waters.

From this time onwards, her voracity knew no bounds. The desire for food, which she had possessed from her earliest days, and which had lain like a germ in the very heart of her nature, was given free play by means of the terrible weapons that Nature had placed at her disposal. No one else should now get a bite; she would be alone in clearing the waters of food.

She now as readily seized her prey lengthwise as cross-wise; indeed, she even preferred, when hungry, to make straight for the head; by so doing, she wasted no time in turning it, but could swallow it at once.

By nature she was very reserved, and had no desire for companionship; but her mental abilities were by no means small, and she was well able to make various observations, and profit by their lessons. Nor was she deficient in memory, as she distinctly showed every spring when going to spawn; she always found her way up the brook to the wide fen.

She was very sensitive to every movement in the water, and in a way heard with ease the boats, “the big birds.” They always splashed so much with their oar-feet, or whisked their tail round in the water. She had often wondered at them! She had discovered that, like the grebe, they carried their young on their back; and, like all the other fish in the lake, she supposed them to be a part of the unrest up on the surface.

Long before they came near her, she was distinctly aware of their approach.