Part 17

The marsh water shines golden black, with a tinge of bronze. Grim is never weary of rubbing against the soft, muddy peat.

Half-decayed remains of dead stalks form a network all over the great cushion at the bottom, and fresh remains of cell-tissue and organic things just dead are always on their way down. But from the depth new life rises once more; the sun is ever setting free tiny, green, mossy balls of slime that lie moored, as it were, to a single fine umbilical cord, and twirl and sway down on the bottom. All at once the cord breaks, and they rise through the water in a cluster like bubbles, and expand into large, fringed umbels.

The willow-wands on the knolls are in flower, and behind the points of land the coots are quarrelling, while the snipe fly round and round in the air, and let the wind play upon their feather-harps.

Then comes the day when she is ready to spawn. A peculiar, and to her inexplicable, desire to bury herself in the rushes and reed-stubble fills her, and she likes to run her big body far up among the grass and sedges, where she can scarcely swim or turn. With joy she feels the thrill right up her flanks.

She has never been very sensitive, least of all when it did not concern herself; and now she looks unmoved upon the excited males as they snap and butt at one another. Unfortunately she has no appetite, or she would have eaten the most tempting of them.

The spawning soon begins, and the fish leap one about another in a cluster; Grim loses all consciousness of her surroundings, while she sheds her golden stream of five hundred thousand clear, yellow eggs.

No sooner, however, is this accomplished than she comes to her senses, and suddenly feels an overpowering hunger after her tender abandonment. Her gently waving tail-fin turns stiff as a wind-filled sail, and with a quick, powerful turn she slips her spiked jaws over the nearest beau, and slowly transfers him to the vacant place within.

Over an hour the wedding-breakfast lasts, and then the great lady swims off complacently with a flap of her late lamented bridegroom’s tail still sticking out of her mouth.

Later on, on her way back through the road of rushes down to the lake, her blood is cold and her will dormant.

The spring was unusually dry; the water from the thaw had sunk in at once, and the brook received little additional water; and when Grim reached the old, half-rotten dam, she found it had been replaced by a new one.

Here she remained together with a number of other fish that gradually collected at the dam, and tried to get through. For two days she was unable to get either forwards or backwards; several times she attempted a leap, but, without success. Then she changed her mind, and went back to the marsh while there was still time.

She was shut in!

X: IN THE MARSH

A wide stretch of marshland, thickly covered with vegetation, and difficult of access, with numerous large pools, full of tussocks and rushes. Century-old peat-pits ran side by side, connected with little watercourses or half-overgrown ditches.

Willow and cotton-grass covered the hillocks, and naze and headland ran out into the black water, in which were islands, sometimes fixed, sometimes floating.

Whole little floating fields of frog-bit and pond-weed would shoot out from a bank, and completely cover the bronze-coloured water; green and smiling they looked, and tempted the foot as a trustworthy bridge; but at a single touch with the tip of one’s boot, the whole mass quivered and trembled.

Down in the deep water where the black horse-leeches pushed their way along, and monster larvæ with bent back and open jaws stood motionless, watching for prey among the refuse, grew the oddest water-forests. They were neither hard nor stiff; their stems consisted of slender stalks held up by the water.

There were bluish green, luxuriant “fir-forests,” and whole groves of palm-like bushes with red flowers upon long stalks. At the edges there were climbing plants, which formed a matted web of stalks and fibres, and bulged out in swelling clouds.

What a curling and bending in everything down there! What pliant shapes! And everywhere there were little, fat, pug-like bastard carp, dozing and opening their mouths without ceasing, making double chins in their enjoyment, and rolling their eyes ecstatically.

From the deep, clear lake with its shining waters, Grim had now come to these low, swampy banks. At first the change was somewhat sudden; but she possessed the ability of her kind to adapt herself rapidly to her circumstances.

Nor did she at first have much difficulty in obtaining food. There were young bream and eels, as well as the “pugs” to go on with; but by degrees, as she grew bigger and the years went on, she had to make herself more and more omnivorous in order to exist. She was living, in a way, like a whale in a lake.

In the winter especially things were difficult. In the lake, which had been her home for more than thirty years, it had been easy to manage. It was too big to be frozen over; even in the severest cold the bottom springs kept large areas open. But this was not the case with the marsh, for here the “air,” during a long frost, became very close. The water took up the marsh-gas from the decaying remains of animals and plants on the bottom, and could not give it off and renew itself with oxygen.

Grim had then to go where flags and knotgrass pricked tiny, almost invisible holes in the ice. She found them by the gleams of light, and noticed that she could breathe freely at such places.

With this exception she generally kept at the bottom during the cold season, burying herself in the warm, fallen vegetation. There she lay and slept, her blood circulated more slowly, and for days together she required no nourishment.

But the torpid state was not complete; now and then she had to move, and then she satisfied her hunger with mussels and snails, and would also examine the mud-shafts of the peat-pits.

Here in the muddy labyrinths she came upon tench, olive-green fish, with black back. Their scales were very small, and their whole body covered with a thick layer of slime. They were coarse fish, with thick, leathery fins. Formerly she could never endure them, and had made use of them chiefly as a kind of healing remedy when she lived in the lake. When her mouth was full of pricks and scratches from fish-hooks, she would go into the mud to consult them and to get a healing plaster stuck upon her wounded snout by rubbing it against their slimy sides; but now, when hunger sharpened her appetite, she had to turn her former benefactors to another use, and get as much as possible out of the consultation. She therefore ate them with pleasure.

In the summer she seldom touched them, but fattened herself on everything that came in her way. She would take a snake that swam across, a frog, a mouse; and if a water-rat made its appearance, she shot up under it, and sucked it in at one mouthful.

In this way she got on fairly well for a few years.