Part 5
Now the weather is clearing, however, and the lake is calming down--real fishing weather, thinks the angler, and he hums the old angler’s song:
“When the wind is in the east, ’Tis neither good for man nor beast; When the wind is in the south, It blows the bait in the fishes’ mouth.”
The terns, with their long forked tails and black caps rise and fall in the air around him. They are good Samaritans to all the half-dead bait he from time to time throws overboard. The poor little ill-used things hastily make for the shadow of the boat or take up a position beside a floating weed. They want to hide because they feel weak; they do not want to go down into deep water to Oa. Then the terns snap them up, and put them down their little red throats.
Three or four of them are pursuing, with shrieks and snarls, another which is flying away with a little bleak, like a piece of white stick in its jaws. It reminds the fisherman of a heron he once shot at, and which sent out a shower of such half-dead little fish.
At that moment he has a bite at one of his lines. The line runs off the reel at a great pace, and the rod, which rests on the row-lock, but with its thick end wedged under a board at the bottom of the boat, bends like a flag-leaf and dips its point down into the water.
He seizes the rod and lifts it. The line is running out at full speed. He carefully checks it, making the resistance stronger and stronger, so as to prevent the fish from breaking the line with a sudden jerk.
Grim has taken the bait, and is now darting about with it. She had been hungry after three days’ storm and wind, and had therefore rushed blindly at the lure. Alas, it is another of those prickly fish, she notices at once, one of those confounded tit-bits that are only to be looked at, but which neither teeth nor throat are ever glad to deal with; and she opens her mouth and chokes and spits.
She gets rid of the fish she had snatched; she sees it, half dead and with long rents in its sides from her teeth, floating on its side with a reddish yellow eye turned up towards her through the water. But the prickly thorn that she took in at the same time is fixed in her jaw.
She darts hither and thither, turning and twisting. Now she is down in deep water, rubbing her wounded mouth upon the bottom, now she darts, with the bubbles in her wake rising above her, round a clump of water-lilies.
The angler sees an island of leaves as big as a dining-table disappear.
Then she is off again. The reel shrieks and hums as if a giant grasshopper sat chirping in it. All at once, Grim leaps out of the water high into the air, so that her golden, black-streaked body, with the panther-like spots and the trickling water-drops, casts a gleam over the lake.
Never had the good man seen such a fish! The very waves that it raises as it returns to the water, breaking the surface like a submarine, show him that it is--as he is accustomed to express it--“one of the good old-fashioned sort.” He continues to gaze open-mouthed at the place where it disappeared, while a flurry of rings spreads out in all directions.
A little later a whirlpool appears on the seething water, and he catches a glimpse of a dorsal fin with the hinder point missing. Then the old fisherman rejoices. A marked fish, one of his oldest, perhaps his biggest!
He winds in, lets the line run out, and winds in again. His big body is perspiring with his exertions, and he has to stand with his legs wide apart and his feet firmly fixed whenever the mighty fish gives one of its sudden jerks.
While this is going on there are bites on two of the perch-lines, and the angler can see they are not small fish either. The lines, which are lying loose over the gunwale, run out at a great pace, so that the winders hop and dance about at the bottom of the boat. One of them is jerked over the edge, so that fish, hooks, and line are lost; the other he tries to make sure of by setting his foot upon it.
Like the back of a cat about to spring, the rod bends under its floundering burden. The old man has to keep on incessantly slacking and tightening the line; hoping to tire out the fish that was dragging his rod from one side to the other.
He notes the smallest movement of his captive. It is still in full vigour, and there are many water-plants and stalks in the way. Will he be able to draw it from the deep water with his fine, fragile line?
Suddenly Grim turns and darts in beneath the boat with such force that the rod must either break or follow her. The angler chooses to let it go in the hope of picking it up on the other side.
It happens as he expected: the rod appears, floats up; he leans over and reaches it.
The fight and nervous excitement recommence--the quick, exciting contest between man and fish.
The wind plays its autumn hymn upon the rushes, and ruffles the water between the yellow-spotted water-lily leaves, while the sun’s rays, as they come and go, light flaming torches among the trees and reeds. They gleam, they sparkle, they flash; and great, heavy, September clouds drift over the lake.
At last the shrewd fisherman has the upper hand, and cautiously draws his captive close up to the boat. He bends down, with his knees upon the gunwale, and leans over with the landing-net, in his right hand.
Grim suddenly finds herself close to the great “water-bird,” and gives a violent jerk. The fisherman reaches out with his arm, and the upper part of his body as far as they will go; but he forgets that he is in a boat and on unsafe ground, loses his balance, and falls overboard with a splash, upsetting the boat as he does so.
No one sees the accident, and his heavy waders drag him quickly down.
Grim darts this way and that, winding the line round him and drawing him to the bottom. And then, among the rocks of the reef, the line breaks; the angler’s body drifts in among the reeds.
* * * * *
Towards evening the sky becomes overcast and the troubled water looks thick and muddy. Little waves leap up, stand for a moment at their height as if trying to keep their balance, and then give up the attempt and roll down.
A solitary little sunbeam still now and again brightens up all the grey-veiled colours, and then the water takes the hues of a fallow-deer, and the water-lily leaves become floating patches of rainbow.
In the muddy valley between the bottom-springs, Oa is beginning to move. She blinks her cunning eyes, and their blue-black pupils become large and round. Then she sets out on a nocturnal expedition across the lake, steals into the rocky grottos of the cloister-cells, and finds a new hiding-place beneath the wreck of a boat--a new arrival. With her snout just in the rent between the bottom and the gunwale, she lies like a dog in its kennel, until night closes in and all is dark and silent.
Then she lets herself slowly drift along the edge to the reedy borders of the lake, taking every drowned dog or cat as gifts from the Creator’s hand.
Everything that has no longer the power to keep above the water, all that is dead and drifts about, belongs to the crayfish and to her.
* * * * *
The Nipper had already found the body when Oa arrived.
IX: THE WEDDING FESTIVAL
Spring has come, and the pike are about to spawn. Grim, the great she-pike, has been lying motionless for days among the bottom vegetation, waiting the call of the sun. And now it has come. One morning it suddenly bursts through and lights up the forest of stalks in the yellow, weedy margin. In the little open spaces between the tufts there is life and movement, and a sound of splashing everywhere; dark scaly bodies rise slowly out of the water. Then the young fish gambol, their fins beating like wings in the sunshine.
Grim’s cold heart, too, feels the spring, and it warms her icy blood. She swims about, full of gentler feelings, she notes an attraction in the shallow water close inshore, the grass of the ditches, and the sheltered pools of the marsh. And suddenly she recollects her bridal chamber, far up at the end of a broad, sun-warmed ditch fringed with flowering willow and drooping birch, with flickering sunlight and shadow, and the splashing of lively wooers.
Spring comes on apace, the sun’s rays piercing ever deeper into the water, where the plants shoot and rise out of the ooze with herculean strength, mass themselves, expand, and throw wide arms abroad. From the stubbly reed-bed rise fresh stems; and all the fallen willow wands that are floating about put forth leaves and take root.
Soon the banks grow green, and in the sour mud of the creek, where in a short time water-soldiers and duck-weed will form hanging islands, brown toads and green frogs are beginning to bark and croak.
All kinds of fish are gambolling with joy and delight; and at last comes Oa, the old recluse. Without evil intentions she approaches the bank, and in the flaming dawn she lays her hundred thousand eggs among the thronging mare’s-tails and grasses. But there is no bridegroom near her, for none exists. Bleak and little roach revel in her roe; and when she has spawned her heart once more grows cold, and she sinks back into the deep water, gloomy and sullen as before.
Grim becomes more and more eager. Her deep-blue pupils, surrounded with a brass-coloured ring, shine like sapphires in an amber setting; the clayey tones along her sides and flanks change to green, and her gill-covers take on a deep orange hue.
Little by little she feels herself attracted by the numerous eager little male pike that incessantly frisk about her, and are already resplendent in their magnificent golden bridal attire. She receives with delight the attentions of the one that for the moment pleases her most; towards the others, and especially those whom she does _not_ like, she is capricious in the extreme, and will eat them if she has an opportunity.
As her spawning-time draws near, she grows heavy and swollen with her roe, and at the same time more irritable and uncertain in temper. She eats nothing, and thinks only of swimming over a flat grassy bottom, where she can rub her distended belly over the soft grass, arching her back like a dog in the consciousness of well-being.
The lake, whose banks are for the most part steep and reedy, never tempts her when she is about to spawn. She prefers to make her way up the brook to a number of large flooded peat-bogs and meadows.
She generally reaches them by a round-about way. At one place where the brook makes a bend and forms swampy ground with miles of reed-forest along its banks, a broad belt of rushes runs through some low-lying meadow-land for some distance. The belt twists and turns, and all the year through, withered rushes lift thin, seedless tassels above the rest. In summer it is grown over, and is little more than a deep bottomless ditch; but in spring, a sudden thaw will swell it to a wide, full channel.
Here, under flowering blackthorn and budding alder-trees, the waters of the bog and the lake are mingled.
* * * * *
One cloudy, misty night, Grim, followed by three ardent male pike, the largest not half her size, makes her way through the ditch. Other suitors have already appeared; the great migration before spawning is in full swing.
In and out she moves, among the shallows and banks of water-plants. Sometimes there is only a channel in mid-stream to follow, sometimes she has to go through a long, narrow passage beneath an over-hanging bank, until she reaches open, submarine plains in broad creeks. Her ardour and determination to overcome all difficulties help her, notwithstanding mud and a rotting dam.
At last she is through, and swimming about at her ease.
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.
One year, however, there was an unusually dry summer, and in order to find sufficient water she had to move from peat-hole to peat-hole, and often had to live for weeks at a time in the pools left in the deeper hollows. Fortunately for her, as the water sank, all the inhabitants of the bog gradually came together in these basins. She came across perch and carp; and eels, leeches and toads were also, like herself, imprisoned here, until the rain should once more bring an abundance of water.
She continued to develop, but otherwise than before; ferocity and cruelty were replaced by cunning and ingenuity. And like all the other pike in the bog, she soon learned to swing herself over the ridges from one hole to another, and even to cross land for short distances.
She had the choice between dying of hunger and finding an expedient.
It seemed as if that passage, long ago, from the flying heron’s beak to the smooth surface of the water had hardened her gills and enabled them to bear the strong, drying oxygen of the air for a longer time; for she often ventured over ridges and peat-dams wider than a high-road.
When she could bear her hunger no longer, she ran herself aground and up into the grass, and then, bending herself together, leaped on in the direction of the new water. As soon as she was in the dry air, she could feel which way she ought to take; the neighbourhood of water affected her sensitive skin and drew her the shortest way. Everything flickered in a golden mist before her eyes, as she crept on, bending and leaping.
It was in the early hours of morning, when the grass was wet with dew, that she made these expeditions overland.
On one of these occasions she got into a large, deep pit, where the crayfish population that annually migrated from the lake had their stronghold. All over the perpendicular, blackened sides of the peat-cutting living crayfish claws opened at her.
Day after day for six months she went hunting here, and had enough to do with making her way into the hard, perpendicular walls in which the nippers had their holes. She knew from her experience in the lake that the crayfish could neither steer nor change their course when, with flapping tail, they darted backwards through the water, and were therefore easily caught when once she had hunted them out.
Only one ancient, mussel-scarred fellow, coal-black all over, and with one large and one very tiny claw, eluded her most ardent endeavours. It sat in a rocky hole, far in, its spear-armed head with the stalked eyes resting pensively upon its two unequal claws.
Once or twice it happened that she was aroused from her torpor at night by feeling a firm, hard grasp upon her body, and she darted round in a circle like a dog after its tail; but the Nipper always knew when to let go.
One day she was also obliged to leave _this_ hole. She managed to break down the ridge between her and a neighbouring pit, where she enjoyed a few months’ ease and comfort. Here she passed the winter, and cleared the mud of every tench, every leech, and every snail.
When spring came she ate everything that came in her way. At this season frogs and toads made their way in multitudes to the pools. The frogs lay croaking and croaking, and the toads barked and growled, all of them full of love and delight, and therefore an easy prey.
Later on she revelled in frogs’ eggs, and swallowed great quantities of the fat, black yolks. Sometimes, too, she could feast on some long threads that were stretched about the reed-stubble; they were the eggs of the big toads, threaded like beads upon a string, and laid in the water to hatch.
On the whole she was glad of the frogs and toads; they kept on reappearing, afterwards too, when the little tadpoles began to swarm.
She could no longer afford to be fastidious; she had to take everything, and not let a crumb be wasted.
During the summer nights she was busy at the surface. The big, heavy moths, which often, in thoughtlessness or carelessness, settled on the water or on some floating straw, became her booty. She ate them, wings, straw and all, like a hungry man trying to satisfy his appetite with prawns.
No wonder that the teeth in her huge mouth gradually developed into something like the whalebone in the mouth of a whale
But a stomach with the cubic capacity of a _hectolitre_ needed more than this!
The bog is veiled in a steaming mist, which hangs like cloud-lakes over the reeds. The moisture penetrates everywhere, and trembling drops hang from everything; and the thousands upon thousands of spiders’ webs show up in all their marvellous workmanship.
Thickets of willow and drooping birches cast black shadows all along the ridges and banks, and large, thick swarms of gnats hang silently in the air. Only a leaping fish or a bathing swallow disturbs the deep morning stillness.