Part 20

Suddenly Grim is unpleasantly reminded of her rival’s presence by seeing her orange-coloured flanks gleam as she makes a charge, and like a dart she shoots up. As they now meet, after their happily-accomplished delivery, they are both fully aware of the purpose of the meeting: they mean to devour one another.

Fin by fin they set off, scowling maliciously at one another. Grim is close to the body of her rival, and as they move on she pushes her in over the edge of the reeds.

During the winter the reeds have been cut, but the crooked-edge, sharp-pointed stumps are left standing just below the surface, like a stiff brush. The marsh-pike keeps getting her body over the brush, which with every movement tears her tail and belly, and all at once rouses her dull, sluggish nature out of its indifference. She blows up her gills and angrily extends her fins, while a thick shower of sparkling gold and silver scales whirls through the water to the bottom.

She slips away from the reed-bed, and swift as lightning turns upon Grim, but the old pirate is not to be caught by a bog-trotter. She sacrifices half her dorsal fin, which is mercilessly torn into streamers down the spines.

Then Grim takes a turn under Terror, dashes up from below with open mouth at her opponent, and fastens her teeth in her adversary’s belly. Terror tries in vain to make use of her teeth. Again and again she makes the attempt, her saw-toothed jaws opening and closing with a snap. But Grim goes on shaking her, while shower after shower of scales flutter around them in the water.

They roll over one another, the ice-floes break, and thousands of small crystals clink and tinkle. Now they are up in the slushy snow, where the dirty, yellow water seethes and bubbles round their lashing tails; now they disappear in a flickering zigzag down to the bottom.

With the tenacity and energy with which Grim is always animated when after prey, she now wrestles with Terror. She pinches the unfortunate fish, tortures and worries her, and keeps it up without interruption. It is not the sort of battle to weary her. She holds her prey between her jaws all the time; it strengthens her purpose, lights the fire in her eye, and encourages her to unceasing perseverance.

The greater the opponent, the greater is her reward and satisfaction. Her stomach desires what tongue and teeth already feel so near; she must succeed in getting this huge morsel--as she once did with her little brother--to lie unresistingly in her mouth, so that she can have the pleasure of turning it about and begin to swallow it.

Terror twists and turns in her efforts to get a bite; but Grim has been fortunate in taking hold so far forward that there is no room left for her to bite. Terror has only her tail-end to strike with, and with it she sweeps up clouds of mud sufficient to hide an elephant.

The battle lasts for more than three hours, and all the ice in the pool is broken into fragments. By this time Grim’s miry opponent is exhausted: success has crowned the efforts of the old fratricide, as it has always done in this kind of contest, ever since she was the length of a darning-needle. Then in a trice she turns the harassed victim over, and suffocates her by wedging her head into her own throat. But it takes her four days to get Terror through the mouth of her draw-bag. At last she had a fish again that went some way!

XII: GRIM DEVELOPS

Grim was now about five feet long, and weighed something like fifty pounds. As with all pike that live in small lakes, her head had grown inordinately. Her daily fight for food necessitated constant use of her head-muscles, which had developed accordingly. In her mouth alone a wooden shoe could easily have been hidden.

The old bright colours along her back and belly were now quite altered. The body vied in blackness with the evil-smelling mud of the bog, and broad, golden-bronze streaks shaded the dull sides. Out in the sunshine she had quite a rusty, coppery appearance.

She was a mythical pike, one of those old-time fish about which the late lamented angler had told wonderful tales in his day. Even the regular mane of scales of a finger’s length, from the back of the neck down over the pectoral fins, was not wanting.

But her eye was evil, a mixture of yellow and green, cold and deceitful as the foam of the bog-waves; it always shone with a fierce hunger, and even on the rare occasions when the hunger was appeased, the expression of that eye was one of insatiable voracity.

She has succeeded in clearing the bog-holes nearest to her own quarters of every frog, water-rat, and wild duckling; and she has eaten up all the swallows that have come to drink as they flew. Again she has had to travel a good way overland, until at last she has come to rest in a wild, wide pool, which she has never before visited.

Here she has had a fresh, welcome success. She has overcome and swallowed another big, muddy specimen of a bog-pike, even heavier than Terror; the fellow had just bolted a smaller one of his own species, and in it lay a full-grown mallard.

Food! Food!

It is true she always felt her stomach rather heavy, for in the course of time she had got it paved with the most remarkable things. Besides various hooks and wire traces, there was a large key that once, in her youth, when she had been standing beneath one of the great water-birds, had come darting like a roach through the water. There was also a dessert-spoon acquired under similar circumstances, a plummet, and, lastly, a watch-chain, from the ill-fated angler’s vest. All these had, however, become encysted, and were not for consumption; at the very most they were an aid to digestion!

She has been a week over her last splendid catch.

She makes another and another; but after a couple of months she has emptied this bog-pool too. What now, and whither?

One evening she works her way in among flowering iris, club-rushes, and marsh-grass, and peers enviously up at the big dragon-flies that are chasing fat flies not an inch above her head. She grows hungrier than ever, and sets to work to devour black horse-leeches in place of eels, and the roots of certain water-plants, which she tries to persuade herself are worms.

In the warm, still, summer evening, the shadows shoot from the banks and ridges, framing the blood-red sunset hues in ebony. Had there been but a few roach left, they would have been playing ducks and drakes over the smooth water.

A reed just beside her moves, and from her hiding-place at the edge of the rushes she sees the reed-warbler flitting about up above. The crafty expression comes into her flat eye; she calculates her distance, and makes a spring.

The first time the bird is too quick for her, but the next time her effort is crowned with success; and the third time she closes her jaws on the reed-warbler’s foster-child, a large, red-eyed young cuckoo!

Grim was an artist in her way, and had her own peculiar tricks. Since the day when she had leapt out of the angler’s boat, she had developed into a regular flying-fish.

Food! Food! The constant refrain both above water and below. To have something in the maw--to have much--as much as possible. Food! Food!

The pool is very deep, with perpendicular, overgrown sides, save in one place where the peat had once been dragged up a slope, making a gradual transition from water to land. The stiff clay is covered with the foot-prints of cattle, and the herbage on the mounds round about is cropped.