Part 22

Life is quickly departing from the hitherto victorious bird; the bold flyer, who has darted down hundreds of times and let the water close over his light, oiled feathers, to rise a moment later in a shower of spray and ascend proudly to dizzy heights, now sways, suffocated, ruffled and limp, upon feet whose claws seem rooted in fish-flesh.

Grim lived all that winter with the eagle on her back, and felt strangely hampered in her movements. The bird gradually decomposed, and at last was only a skeleton that sometimes appeared weirdly above the surface.

In the spring the whole rotted away, but Grim never got rid of the claws. To the day of her death they remained embedded in her back.

She now began to find more dangerous enemies. Her various predatory attacks, which had not all passed unobserved, attracted an ever-increasing amount of attention. In the surrounding districts, where she was spoken of as a serpent and a dragon, myths began to be formed; she had once more to guard against man.

They fired guns at her, and once she got a couple of stray shot in her side, but otherwise escaped with only a fright. Traps were set out, but they were fortunately much too small to allow of her getting into them.

One day she lay burrowing in the mud, so far down that not even the tiniest ripple reached the surface. There were indications nevertheless. From time to time little green-bearded, slime-covered pieces of reed came up vertically through the water, and lay flat as soon as they reached the surface. A farmer’s lad, out spearing eels, sent his fork down eagerly. He missed his mark--as the shot had done before.

One day, in the early summer, however, Grim came very near to finding her match.

XIII: A FIGHT WITH AN OTTER

The harrier was sitting on her newly-hatched young, and the pair of crows were feeding theirs for the last time; it was the time of the owls--and the nightingales. Silent and weary, the cuckoo came from the meadow-land to the bog, where the twilight enveloped it and hid it on its branch.

The willow-thickets and the rushes settled gradually into cool and shade; only along the promontories and banks, where the dragonflies hunted, did the mid-summer sunlight still hold its ground.

The water began to sparkle with strong, bright colours, and patches of yellow, scarlet, and blue floated about, shot with brilliant flakes of emerald and purple, which gave darkened reflections of the birch-tops.

Only a few moments before, all the sloping banks of the bog had been held by the sun; it shone upon the flowers of the wild chervil and upon a narrow strip of orange gravel that had been scraped out of one of the banks.

But now it was gone. The fully-opened hawthorn flowers reluctantly gave up their sunset blush, and shudderingly paled before the approaching gloom.

Suddenly the nightingale up in the thicket becomes silent, stops in the middle of its highest trill, and begins to snarl.

A large otter with low-set ears cautiously raises its head above the strip of gravel. It sniffs long and continuously, as it stretches its round, shaggy neck out over the ridge.

Above the distant banks on the other side of the bog, the first glow of the full moon peeps out. Like a monster toadstool, it grows up out of the horizon, sending up a cloud of purple into the air. Up and up it goes, and when almost half its disc is visible, a group of firs, whose tops stand out against it, change to a giant poppy just unfolding.

For a moment the flower stands out perfect, large and round at the end of its slender, black stalk, and then the illusion is shattered: from a toadstool the poppy has turned into a moon!

Then the otter comes right up out of the earth, with body and tail and four legs, and shuffles down the slope. A couple of herons, fishing at the edge of the bog, bend their necks and make off with hoarse, shrill trumpetings; and a herd of splashing heifers, scenting the approach of a beast of prey, begin to growl and snort.

The otter came to the bog every two or three months, when it was tired of hunting fish in the lake.

A rover’s blood flowed in its veins. Nature had endowed it with a peculiarly active power of assimilation, which was probably necessary if it was to keep warm in the cold water; it needed daily its own weight in fish, and therefore had to be incessantly changing its hunting-ground.

It was timid and suspicious, but a great glutton.

Pike, which it used especially to catch in the bogs, were somewhat dry, it is true, but after all, one could not have salmon and trout every day!

After having labouriously shuffled over a piece of land, and reached the largest of the big pools, it allowed itself to glide noiselessly from its slip--a path trodden in the grass--into its true element.

A few minutes later there was an unusual disturbance in the water, which splashed high up about the dunes and foamed over the banks. A wild chase was going on in the depths, and where it passed the rushes bowed their sheaves and the flags their fans. Black mud was stirred up in whirlpools; seething bubbles came to the surface and burst.

The otter, with a newly-caught fish in its mouth, had been on its way out to a little island, intending to have its meal under a sallow, when it was suddenly attacked and robbed of its prey. It caught a glimpse of the indistinct outline of a great fish, and exasperated at such audacity, determined to go in chase of the robber.

An attempt to get beneath Grim, in order to seize her round the gills or by the belly, was unsuccessful; at the decisive moment Grim had turned aside, so that the otter had to set its teeth where it could. And it needed a well-placed grip to hold such a giant fish.

The instant it has taken hold--a little behind the neck--Grim darts into deep water with her assailant. The otter backs, extends his fore and hind legs far out from his body, and spreads his web, so as to offer as much resistance as possible. Just as the weasel lets itself be carried away by the hare in whose neck it has fixed itself, so now the otter allowed himself to be dragged through the bog by the lynx of the waters.

Grim soon sees that this pace is wearing out her strength, and pauses for a moment.