Part 2

Grim was passionate, fierce, and reckless in her attacks, and gave herself up to the intoxicating pleasure of the chase until she grew dizzy. She ventured all, and lost herself in rapacious lust. The cunning perch seldom made a false step, but looked carefully ahead, and was always cool and self-restrained in his behaviour; and yet he was always ready--quite as ready as she--to attack, but had a masterly perception of the chances of success. He would frequently dart towards her, then suddenly stop and consider, and stand sniffing at her like a dog.

She was still only a hobbledehoy, flabby and loose-jointed, and not quick enough in emergencies. She had only just found out where the great ones of her own species liked to post themselves, and where it behoved her, therefore, to be on her guard; but beyond this she was not burdened with much experience.

As a young fish she had never been out into deep water, but wisely kept to the quiet parts--the channels and the broad waters of the creek, where her strength was proportionate to the exigencies of her surroundings, and where she instinctively felt that her great enemies would run aground if they pursued her. Here she found shelter among the reeds and the rushes.

But there was something beyond; something great and strong, something always disquieting; and this attracted her.

She began to go farther and farther afield, and one day, when the water was especially bright and clear, she set out on a journey from one end of the lake to the other.

The bottom of the creek was fertile, hilly country. Long slopes, clothed with water-lily plants, and laden with yard-high, round-stalked grass, ran out in parallel chains, framing, as it were, a corresponding stretch of broad, deep valleys. Here and there were steep narrows, passes through which the shoals of fish had to venture when going from one pasture to another.

She swam just below the surface of the water, and looked with interest at the varied scenery of the bottom and all the unfamiliar and strange things that presented themselves. How delightful it was to let herself go and give her fins free play!

She reached a rocky reef, and swam over a group of high, wild mountains that rose steeply out of the black bottom ooze with rugged sides, wooded in parts, and in others barren and naked. The mountains were full of deep ravines, the ice of centuries of winters’ freezing of the bottom had furrowed them with crests and clefts, planed off the points of the summits, and formed rounded tops or plateaux.

Here and there in this rocky land with its numerous winding inlets and sharp corners, a conspicuous stump stuck up. Several of them had a ring at one end, and from a few waved a bit of rope. In the course of time they had dropped down from the other world. They were lost boat-hooks and anchors that had become hopelessly fixed; for the rocky reef was a good fishing-ground.

There were many crayfish in the lake, and Grim, as she swam, had a bird’s-eye view of them walking about, swarming over the bottom of the lake in all directions, laboriously measuring out the kilometres in crayfish steps.

In several places there were whole towns of them, and in the perpendicular cliffs on the deep side of the reef, there was a large crayfish population. Here she noticed certain specimens, larger than she cared about. They lay in wait among the rocks or in the depths of the primeval forest, and caught what fish they could in their deadly claws. Or they ran backwards through the water with claws and feelers extended, step by step and with a beat of the tail; if the waves they set up had not warned her in time, they might have run into her at any moment.

From the reef she passed on over a great sandy desert, where the worms lay in rings, and the fresh-water mussels in colonies. She came upon some unpretending and not very luxuriant plants with swinging stalks that could turn with the current and the waves; but what struck her most, and broke the monotony more than anything else, was the skeleton remains of animals, boats, and a few human beings, that lay scattered about.

Where the substratum of the rocky reef still extended under the sand without disappearing altogether, she saw these slowly-perishing remains of the meteors from the air-world, lying scoured and clean as on a tray. In the eyeholes of the skulls the crayfish sheltered when they rested on their long journey over these perilous wastes, and perch lurked in the shadow of the ribs.

Farther out, where current and drifting sand alternately had the mastery, things were incessantly being uncovered and reburied; and in the middle of the desert waste, where there were quicksands, sometimes an arm would project from the sand-dunes, sometimes a leg, or the frontal bone of a skull bearing a huge pair of horns, or the prow of a boat. Finally, the desert ended in a whole skeleton reef--the remains of a drove of animals that a dozen years before had lost their way in the drifting snow and the dark, taken a short cut over the ice, and fallen through.

Once beyond this, the fertile bottom, with black soil, plants and little fish, began again. Then came a new, high-lying land, not stony and rough like the first, but rich and luxuriant. It lay outside a projecting point of land, of which it formed the natural continuation under the water.

On each side of the point a long creek stretched far inland, the scenery under the water being a repetition of that above. A luxuriance and fertility was visible on all sides; the water-grass waved in stretches like corn in the fields, and the giant growths of the water-forests were like the shady trees on land.

On the dividing-line between these fertile regions and the sterile tracts where, on stormy days when the waves ran deep, the drifting sand laid bare old, fish-gnawed skeletons, or covered up new ones, there was a big slough, which formed the beginning of a low-lying, wide-spreading bog, in which the sources of the lake had their origin.

There was always movement in the vegetation here. The mud rose and fell as if waves were passing beneath it. Now and then the surface opened, and jets of water as thick as tree-trunks shot into the air. There were high and low jets, forming, as it were, trees and bushes of water, which sometimes burst into bloom with large, strange-hued, fantastic blossoms of foam and bubbles.

In this slough lived the hermit of the lake, the giant sheat-fish _Oa_, a scaleless, dark, slimy monster, which only on rare occasions, generally in stormy weather, rose from her mudbed and revealed herself to human eyes. Generally, she moved about on the bottom, living her lonely life of plunder where the law of gravitation ultimately brought everything that was no longer able to swim or float about.

Centuries earlier, pious men had brought her progenitor, wrapped in wet grass, here to the lake, and planted the family of _Silurus_ outside their cloister walls, so that its oily, digestible flesh could serve them as a good dish for fast-days.

The experiment was only moderately successful, and this hardy old fish was the last of her race.

Oa had the body of an eel, but was as long and thick as a boa constrictor. If she were ever caught, and placed upon a wagon, her tail would hang out beyond even the longest wagon-perch.

Her head was large and squat, with a huge shark’s mouth and small, blinking eyes. Six long, worm-like barbels, whose ends curled and twisted, hung from the corners of her mouth; she felt her way with them as she sedately crawled over the muddy bottom. She had neither neck nor breast, but her capacious stomach hung down immediately behind her gullet, like that of an old sow. It was always distended, and apparently so heavy that its owner’s back was quite bent.

Oa was a sinister-looking skulker in dark places, a terror to every poor fish that had been injured and could no longer swim nimbly about.

Like a moss-grown tree-stump she lies buried in the mud when the still inexperienced Grim swims in among the bottom springs, and again and again unwittingly passes over her scaleless, dull green body. She is quite invisible, only the two longest of her barbels projecting from the mud, and incessantly curling and bending like two earth-worms hastily making for the bottom at the approach of an enemy.

Grim, who is always in want of food and cannot resist delicacies, swoops down like a falcon at sight of the “worms,” without noticing the watchful gleam in the two little amber-coloured stones that lie quivering on the muddy bottom. She snaps eagerly at the nearest “worm,” but it escapes her by adroitly rolling itself up.

The active little pike is still too far off the big pirate’s teeth; it must be enticed nearer, so that she can be certain when she strikes.

Grim does not respond to the invitation, however, but prefers to try the other “worm,” and when that, too, with a rapidity unusual in a worm, curls up into a ball and goes to the bottom, she instinctively grows suspicious, and sets her tail-screw going, just as the cunning water-hyena throws off its mask of mud, and makes a wild dash at her.

Grim flees precipitately--so terrified that her cold blood almost stiffens--and darts out of the black cloud that Oa in her eagerness has raised.

The entire hollow seems alive now; everything is gliding and rocking, everything is moving beneath her; she seems to be swimming in black darkness with an angry, gaping, sucking mouth close behind her. She has to keep up full speed with her tail, and to paddle with all her fins, fore and aft, to avoid being drawn in.

When the water begins to clear, and daylight returns, she finds herself in the middle of a shoal of gay little fish, which, at her sudden appearance among them, scatter like a flock of starlings at the dart of a sparrow-hawk down among them. She feels the seething and boiling from the quick flapping of tiny tails; and involuntarily she goes with them, swimming away as quickly as the most nimble of the shoal, to a large, wide-spreading island of reeds.

Here Grim remained for a month, during which time she calmed down, and came to a full understanding of her own cruel, voracious nature.

One day, when she was proceeding along the border of her new beat, she came upon some precipitous cliffs, standing stone upon stone straight up from the bottom, full of holes and openings. She swam into large, slimy-green caverns and lofty grottos. It was the ruin of the old monastery she had found.

For the present she dared not venture back across the lake. The encounter with Oa had given her a feeling that dangers lurked out in the deep water, to which she was by no means equal. She turned into the nearest creek, and lost herself in a series of large reed-forests. Through them she went on into the bay until the world around her grew narrower and narrower, the surface of the water and the bottom approached one another, and the dreaded element in which she could not breathe made known its superior force by many loud sounds.

Here a great fringe of forest encircled the lake, and Grim turned headlong back.

IV: THE MARAUDERS

Borne on a gentle breeze, a large crane-fly comes sailing out of the wood. It likes to cool its long legs, as it flies, by trailing them along the surface of the water. The whirligigs are after it, but it easily avoids them. Then comes a sudden surprise: a fish pops up its mouth, and closes its scissor-jaws with a snap on the insect’s legs, and it disappears in the centre of a rocking series of rings.

The lake is perfectly calm, its green-black surface smooth and shining, and full of drifting summer clouds. The reeds are reflected in it and look double their height, and the trees mirror their branches there, seeming twice as leafy; and a red house with a white flagstaff on one of the banks becomes quite a little submarine palace.

More crane-flies arrive, and circle after circle breaks the stillness of the water, just as mole-hills break the uniform smoothness of the meadow, as fishes’ mouths dart up by the score side by side.

It is in one of the valleys in the submarine mountainous region that this shoal of thousands of bleak lies. It covers the area of a market-place, and makes the water alive for fathoms down.

On the one side rises the forest of weed, like a fir-forest on a Norwegian mountain; on the other the thick green water-grass waves and bends like the corn on some fertile plain in Hungary. In front and behind, the valley winds on between the hill-sides until it widens out and finally loses itself in the barren, sandy desert.

Suddenly, at the end of the neighbouring valley, the water seethes and foams. It is cleft incessantly from bottom to surface, bubbles rise and whirlpools are formed, and a long strip of lake foams and spurts.

It is not like a single large animal darting forward with rapidly twisting tail, and leaving a wake and waves behind it; but a general effervescence that makes the depths gleam with millions of scales.

It is the perch, the marauders of the lake, on a hunting expedition!

They go together in a large company, like soldiers in an army, rows of them above, beside, and behind one another. There are hundreds upon hundreds of them, and yet a single unit.

With their uppermost layer only a couple of inches below the surface of the water they hasten on. Then all turn at once, changing from the long, narrow marching column into compact formation. A fresh signal, inaudible, imperceptible to all but themselves, and once more, in a trice, the narrow, smoothly-gliding hunting-column is reformed.

Just as they twist and turn in the horizontal plane, so do they in the vertical. They go suddenly and headlong from the surface to the depths, spinning out from their compact mass a long, living thread.

And the thread becomes longer and longer, and thinner and thinner, while they pass through one of the narrows in the submarine mountainous region.

It is the shoal of bleak they are after. Now they are in the valley where it lies.

The lively little freshwater herring as yet suspect no danger; they are in constant motion, occupied in snapping up the fallen, half-drowned insects. Noses are pushed up, and little thimble-like mouths open; the water streams in, and with it the food. An eager interchange from bottom to surface goes on; for when the upper layer is satiated, it likes to enjoy its feeling of well-being in peace, until voracity once more makes them all rivals.

The splash of the waves on the surface lifts the gluttons up and down, while the ground-swell rocks the satiated to rest.

The perch have quickened their pace; involuntarily the speed is increased; they already scent their prey.

Foremost of the company, with a dark-golden, high-backed leader at their head, swim a couple of hundred of the finest perch. They are at their strongest age, and in best possible condition, suffering neither from too great a weight of fatness, nor from the nervous lassitude of insufficient nourishment. They lead, and with frolicsome eagerness push past one another, so as to be the first to arrive.

After them comes the great mass of the horde, big, heavily-laden craft, their round backs and swelling bellies testifying to their success in their toil for material needs. There are perch among them of half an arm’s-length, and the thickness of the biggest of wrists. Sheaves of silvery-gleaming rays flicker far out in their wake.

The rest of the fierce horde are large and small mingled--hundreds of perch of half-a-pound’s weight, and rank upon rank of others well over two pounds.

For the present the whole flock keeps to the bottom, darting along with dorsal fin erect, the stiff spines bristling menacingly. It is as well to have bayonets fixed in case of the sudden appearance of a pike.

All at once the van slips away from the rest, and the latter have to exert themselves to catch up, twisting and turning their tails, and unfurling the stiff sail of their dorsal fin. There must be nothing now to check their speed; fair-weather sailing is over, and the privateering expedition has begun.

The certainty of booty fills them all.

The vanguard has led the marauders well; they have come _under_ their prey, and now shoot up among the unfortunate, unsuspecting bleak. All order among the assailants instantly ceases, and each member thinks only of its own mouth, and cares for nothing but getting it filled.

Like yellow flashes of water-lightning the perch dart into the shoal of little fish, and like grain among a flock of chickens, masses of bleak disappear into their mouths. They kill and devour--and it will be still worse when the rear-guard comes up.

Now they arrive, and the alarm in the swarm of bleak below spreads with magical swiftness to the upper layers, where the bewildered little creatures make off at full speed. Gleam after gleam flashes up as the little shining fish, uncertain of their way, twist and turn about. Each makes itself as long and thin as it can, so as to show as little as possible, and disappear, as it were, in the water.

But now the fierce horde becomes still fiercer. The rear-guard overtakes the fugitives and cuts off their retreat; and smack after smack is heard after their charge.

The swarm of bleak scatters in wild panic. Thousands of them, in their terror, make for the surface, leaping into the air like jets from a fountain. They tumble over one another and try in their bewilderment which can leap highest and farthest. They rise like flying-fish out of the water with a flash, and once more disappear with a splash into the water. There is a splash when they rise, and a splash when they again reach the surface of the water; making a sound like the falling of torrents of rain.

Hell is beneath them in the water! The yellow devils not only menace them from the side; they come upon them from all directions. When they descend in crowds from their flight into the air, they grow stiff with terror on finding themselves face to face with great, amber eyes that seem starting out of their sockets to go greedily hunting on their own account. Then a mouth opens, shoots out a pair of concertina-like lips, and changes into a funnel; and the poor little fish disappear into a chasm, like threads into a vacuum cleaner.

Above the spot a cloud of terns is circling. They fly low with half-extended legs and drooping wings, ready to dart down. Sometimes they make a catch, sometimes miss their aim, but have the good fortune to take a fish that inadvertently appears close by; indeed the bleak often leap straight into the birds’ open beak. The birds hold them at all sorts of angles in their beak, and fly away with them, shrieking and screaming, pursued by their fellows.

Poor little bleak! they were so pretty to look at. An emerald green colour extended from the back right over the head and nose; and the rims of their eyes when they blinked could sparkle and shine like the gem itself. Their shining breast was whiter than a swan’s, and their plump sides gleamed and sparkled like ice under a wintry moon.

But from the time they left their Creator’s hand they were intended to serve as food for _others_.

* * * * *

A boat lay anchored a few hundred yards off. In it was an elderly man.

An angler this. He had been out since early morning, and had a delightful day.

Not a single bite. But what did that matter?

He was lying now at the bottom of the boat, dreaming.

He was a regular visitor to the lake. His ancestors’ love of a free, out-of-door life had entered into his blood.

It is well known that it takes three generations to make a gentleman; but it would take three times as many to create, out of a race that ever since the morning of time had lived out of doors, a generation that did not care to handle either gun or rod.

In his youth his gun had been his best friend; but the chase demands much of legs and muscles and heart. When a man is no longer in his prime, he should beware of paying ardent court to Dame Diana. In her suite--it is useless to deny it--the old man is seldom looked upon with favour: he has had his day. But Father Neptune clasps him rapturously in his wet embrace, and sets the fish around his boat leaping and playing.

It was thus in his later years that his fishing rod had become the old man’s joy and companion.

Season after season he made his weekly journey from town by rail, and then drove out to the lake. He fished in the good old-fashioned way, talked very little, and was always alone in the boat.

* * * * *

The weather to-day, from a fisherman’s point of view, is the worst possible. The July sun is shining hotly, and sends its beams deep down into the water.

The lake slumbers. There is a bottle-green hue above the deep water, and a lilac shade in the shallows; but over the sandy bottom the colour is drab. Far off a flock of wild ducks rising raise some little, gentle waves, that look so blue, so blue!

The angler, who is a big, sturdy man with large, black-rimmed spectacles upon his voluminous nose, is in his customary fishing-dress--an old straw hat with an elastic under the chin, his coat off, and no collar, on his legs a pair of thick, yellowish brown moleskin trousers, his feet in a pair of felt shoes, lined with straw.

He generally stays all day, and it is still far from evening.

He is now lying outstretched in midday drowsiness, enjoying the great peace that rests on the lake. He has wound the ends of his lines round his wrist; he waits patiently, and if towards evening he is fortunate enough to haul in a pike, he will be filled with a quiet, intense joy.

Suddenly he awakes with a start. He hears a rushing sound like that of the paddles of a distant steamer striking and tearing the water; he sees the terns flocking, and the surface of the water broken again and again by bleak leaping high into the air. He takes up his anchor, and rows up until he hears the smack, smack of the greedy perch all round him, and knows he is in the middle of the whirlpool of fish.

He gets four lines clear, and has enough to do in throwing them out and pulling them in. He throws off his hat and waistcoat, and loosens his belt--but even then he is drenched with perspiration.

At last he can do no more, and drops exhausted on to a thwart.

In less than twenty minutes he has caught more than fifty perch, weighing from one to three pounds apiece; they are lying in a brassy heap in the boat.

Then he opens his wallet, takes out the bottle containing clear liquid, and takes a nip. This he is accustomed to do every time he catches a fish of any importance. He drinks to the health of the lake, the lake with the fresh waves and the clear, bright water--the lake that treasures his dearest memories.

V: THE PEARLY FISH

Between a cloudy sky and rough water the wind tore through reeds and rushes.

Grim was lurking at the edge of the bottom vegetation; she had not seen fish-food since the previous evening.

There is a splash in front of her, a broad foot is pushed obliquely down into the water and forces a large, heavy “swimming-bird” past her.

A little later there is a sudden gleam. A small fugitive of a fish darts past as though taking advantage of the wake of the big bird, from one reedy shelter to another.

Grim has already eaten so many bleak and roach that they are beginning to be everyday fare; and now, there goes a new kind of food, a fish that shines all red and green and blue and black, with large, glittering, beady eyes!

At a distance she follows the tit-bit that swims through the water like no other fish, turning incessantly round and round on its own axis.

How hard it works! there is a bright starry light all round it, and its tail-fin quivers behind in a long thick trail.