Part 25

Then they set to work to drain the whole bog. They started the old windmills from the peat-cutting time, whirled all the screws about, and pumped the water from one large pool into another.

Grim was imprisoned, and at last lay buried in slush. Had they only gone on for another day they would have discovered her; but, fortunately for her, the wind dropped, and when it seemed to be all over with her, the high dam which kept in the water of the neighbouring pool broke, and all their labour was wasted.

After this the enthusiasm and interest cooled.

Who said it was a crocodile? Had anyone seen it? Was it not more likely to have been an otter? For the local board did not believe in serpents or in dragons!

XV: LUCK

He climbed over some barbed-wire fences, and in doing so made a large number of ventilation holes in his nether garments.

The primitive fishing-tackle that dangled behind his back consisted of a piece of rope with a couple of beer-barrel bungs for a float, and a length of strong, home-twisted iron wire for a trace. The great hook, which must have been intended to catch whales with, was a clumsy steel one that the village smith’s apprentice, who was just finishing his time, had made for him; the rod was a short, thick beanpole.

Little Rasmus was an angler with no shrewdness or intelligence worth mentioning. In his hand he carried an old, battered water-can, in which were his bait--a few bastard carp, caught by trawling with an osier-basket in the village pond. They had not been treated secundum artem; they had not spent the night in a tub under a running tap, and had not felt any salutary coolness of the gills from having small pieces of ice dropped into their tepid water from time to time. No, a little grass and mud at the bottom of the can was all they had had in which to keep themselves alive.

Rasmus tried several, and at last found one that could just flap its tail. From habit, and for luck, he spat upon it.

The pools were smooth and clear in the cool September air. To look down into them was like looking through a magnifying-glass at the bottom, where brown-shelled, fresh-water mussels and white-shelled planorbes were discernible among the water-grass and mosses. The reed-tassels, that had formerly been so blue, were now brown and downy at the tip; and all the flags among the rushes trembled under the weight of their heavy seed-pods.

Rasmus quickly made ready his line and went out.

“Aatch!” cried a snipe, as soon as he set foot in the bog, and a little later he put up seven or eight more, which fluttered along in uneven zigzags over the muddy herbage, and then suddenly rose in steep, winding curves. With interest the boy watched them in their rapid flight, saw how they hastened the strokes of their wings and circled round the bog, until one by one they broke from the rank and disappeared in a downward dive.

At the end of a ridge, which ran out in a blunt promontory in one of the pits, he tried a throw, and stood for a little while waiting; but as the bait had found a hole in which to hide, and the big bung-float lay still, he pulled it up, and went, with his rope-line gathered over his outstretched arm, to a new place.

He came into a thicket of meadow-sweet and wild raspberries. Late-flowering blue forget-me-nots covered the ground. He plucked one, smelt it, but threw it away as the sound of a great splash reached his ear.

By balancing along a plank he got on to a little solitary island surrounded by duck-weed. The plank swayed very much under him, and the island sank alarmingly beneath his weight; but he could see that it had borne people before, and he was on it now! A bushy grey willow grew in the middle of the island, and a spike of purple loose-strife raised its head above it.

* * * * *

Grim was lying in a flat, muddy bay, hidden in a large clump of mares’-tails. A fat, lazy carp was half swimming, half floating in the open water in front of her. Had she not been in the bog with its scarcity of food, the very sight of such carrion would have made her sick; as it was, she took it with thankfulness, and ran at it with such greed that she gulped it straight down, and got a large steel hook far down in her stomach.

For a moment she felt it was an uncomfortable mouthful; the flabby morsel must have gone down the wrong way. Well, she would disgorge it!

But she could not, and there was a thick stalk like a water-lily stem that kept tickling her throat. She was going to spit the stalk out, when she noticed that it was rooted in a tuft of reeds.

“Rubbish!” thought Grim, as she flourished her fins and twisted her tail; for she meant to get out of this warm corner. She set her teeth and started off. The mares’ tails broke and the rushes curtsied as she crashed along; everything rocked--the bank and the bay, the reeds and the island; it seemed to the boy as if a pig were running round and rooting about under the water.

The enthusiastic fisherman in grey-weather cloth, with sky-blue rod, silk line, and running tackle, had never had the luck to catch this monster; and here was little Rasmus with his bean-pole, his steel hook and his tethering-rope, and his tackle held!

Grim pulled at the line till the rod was half under water. The boy had all but let go, when a sudden violent jerk upset him. He had no time to save himself, and with the rod in his arms he fell into the willow-bush. The rope tightened so that the strands creaked and groaned; but the rod was fast in the bush.

Rasmus thinks of making for the shore by the plank, but sees, to his terror, that the island is afloat. The fish on his hook has pulled it away from its anchorage, and is now dragging him out into the deep water. The water bubbles about the rope and foams out from the island, as if it were the bow of a racing-yacht. Sometimes the little raft heels over horribly, so that Rasmus’s wooden shoes are filled with water. He has quite given himself up for lost, and is repeating the Lord’s Prayer.

In the meantime, Grim is dragging him, like a second Tom Thumb, from one end of the pool to the other. She twists and turns, dives down head first to the bottom, only to shoot straight up a few seconds later to the surface to lash it into foam and waves. Great bubbles and myriads of atoms of horrid, black peat-sediment float like swelling clouds in all directions.

Now and then the boy catches sight of a wrinkled, moss-grown back about as long as a bull’s. It looks to him like one of the ancient oaks of the bog coming up to lie and float on the surface.

Gradually, as the large, pointed steel hook enters farther and farther into Grim’s intestines, and makes her cold, red blood flow the wrong way, her movements become less and less rapid.

The water makes things dim; she no longer sees clearly, and runs full tilt into banks and clumps of reeds. She feels delightfully surfeited, and darts about the pool with the sensation of dragging with her the greatest booty she had ever taken in her life. How it seems to fill her stomach! At last, at last she is satiated, so that her throat seems ready to burst and her jaws to part asunder; and all at once she notices the same strange over-burdened feeling that she had had that day many years ago, when in greed she had swallowed the big perch.

Wildly and recklessly she drags on the rope, careering around with her little captor; but every time she jerks him off an island, or through thickly-matted vegetation, she drives the point of the iron nearer to her heart. At last, in the fever of death, she rushes right in to the bank, and runs the boy aground on an island of reeds.