Part 6

The great bog-snail, with its horse-like head and bat-like ears, has come out of its shell and is feeling everything that comes within its reach, groping its way along, and then with a jerk dragging its spiral shell after it. Now it fastens itself to a little dead fish and sucks out its eyes, and finally comes to rest upon the broad leaf of an iris, the point of its shell still trembling with the movement of the water.

A boat-bug that has grown tired, and drawn in its oars, also composes itself to rest. Slowly it sinks to the bottom of the water, where it settles down comfortably and with discrimination among caddis-worms, planorbis, and young salamanders. Even a water-beetle that is in a hurry and, with its head in the mud, is fussing about everywhere, is roughly tossed aside by the powerful palpi.

Up on the clear surface swims the grebe. Its back is dark, the head, with the beautiful ruffle round its neck, poised high; but breast and belly are a glistening slivery white. It never goes on shore, never even ventures into shallow water; for it must be where it can dive without hindrance. On its back it carries its tiny young, holding its wings protectingly round them as they lie buried in its back-feathers as in a cushioned hollow.

The male swims beside them and dives after food, which he puts into the gaping mouths of the young as they chirp and flap their little stumpy wings.

Grim knows the divers well, and they know her--or so, at least, they think.

This morning, however, in her insatiable hunger, she sets her teeth into a webbed foot and upsets the little boat, so that all the young ones fall out. With the greatest possible speed she gulps down the whole flock, and then, more or less appeased, goes to the bottom, having learnt feathers do not disagree with her at all.

Until next morning she found herself just as hungry again.

Then she was fortunate enough to gain fresh experience about feathers.

In the early dawn, while the rays from the rising sun shed their peculiar colours over the bog, and made it shine with green and yellow, with purple and indigo, she made a dash at a fish on the surface, without suspecting that up in the air above her there was a winged rival, who also desired the booty.

The tern swooped headlong downwards as Grim leaped headlong upwards, and the mouths of the two spoilers closed at the same moment over the little fish. Grim, however, opened her mouth the wider, and closed it with the greater force, and she bit with a voracious violence as great as if she were about to eat the carcass of an ox.

She got the fish and the tern’s head in the same mouthful, noticed that she was well laden, and backed downwards, drawing the bird with her into deep water, where she swallowed her strange prey.

What an immense blessing fish with feathers were! For several days she felt so thoroughly satisfied!

From that time she considered every creature upon the surface of the water as her lawful booty. No sooner did a wild duck drop on to the water in its evening flight, than Grim darted up after it from her hole in the mud. At intervals of a day she took both the grebes and cleared the creeks of coots and a couple of young storks that had come for the purpose of learning to fish.

But still the craving for food allowed her no rest. She had to be constantly extending her domain and finding new territory.

See the marsh now that July has come!--July, luxuriant, mature, with clouds for hips and swelling breasts, and a sun that seems weary of journeying. Like sea-birds that have no air under their wings for their flight, come puffs of wind, throwing themselves into peat-bogs and marsh-pools. The air is one continuous drowsy hum of flies and gnats; and the reed-warbler is in full voice.

Grim lies dozing in the tepid water, and sees the world above her indistinctly and uncertainly as through thick grass. She only notices that out of the shining blue up there, there now and then appears a little dark shadow. It comes down suddenly, pauses for an instant as it touches the water, and is gone again.

It is something alive, she guesses--something for _her_!

Wherefore she disguises her torpedo-body, and awaits her opportunity.

A moment later the vegetation trembles, the thick masses of sphagnum moss bulge out like clouds, a storm rises on the bottom. The heap of moss lifts, the surface of the water rocks and is suddenly broken by a splash as Grim darts up at the very moment that a swallow, with a graceful swing, skims a gnat off the water.

The surface grows calm, the bubbles float off and burst before reaching the bank, while Grim sinks back into her bed with the bird on its way through her gullet.

The water-beetles and gnats were jumbled together in one muddy mass.

Thus the struggle for food was daily sharpening her wits.

Formerly she had resorted to the islands of water-lilies to catch fish; now there _were_ no fish, but experience had taught her that here the birds came to drink. With her nose just under the margin of the leaf, she stood ready; and she captured many a water-wagtail, now the white with the moon-silvered feathers, now the yellow--yellow as newly-opened marsh-marigolds.

It sometimes happened, too, that she got a wood-pigeon, or a peewit, or a snipe; and once she took an old, full-grown heron. She seized it by the leg and backed with it, drawing it out into deep water, where it drowned.

But the heron tried repeatedly to spit her upon his beak, and in this way she lost one of her eyes.

XI: TERROR

In the largest of the old peat-holes with their dark brown water, a single large fish could be seen, in bright sunshine, lying motionless among the rushes under the bank.

From time immemorial it had lived in this bog-pool, and seldom left its waters. A wild duck, carrying pike’s roe among its feathers, had planted it there long ago.

_Terror_ was not quite so big as Grim, but was longer and leaner, with the head and teeth of a shark.

Many a time had she and Grim fallen out with one another, and fought viciously in their struggle for food. The scars left by their bites lay in deep furrows down their flanks, and were covered with colourless scales arranged in spirals and circles.

Of late, however, they had wisely avoided one another, keeping each to her own large pool.

During her first year in the bog, Grim had been followed by several powerful male fish, and a number of younger males swam round about. The second year there were only a few of them left, and in the spring, when the heavens again began to give light and warmth, both she and Terror had been obliged to finish their spawning alone.

Many a happy bridegroom had slipped down their throats; and now, between them, they had cleared the whole bog.

Languid and emaciated, they had now gone into deep water to rest, until the desire for good and abundant nourishment suddenly became intense, and inflamed their courage and foolhardiness.

One morning, before daylight had penetrated into the water, Grim catches a glimpse through it of the swarthy belly of the old fish. Driven by hunger, she has come a little way out of her hole, and is now lurking at the edge of the vegetation just above.

Large pieces of ice and slushy snow are drifting about in the pool, but along the banks and the edges of the tussocks, whither the spring has brought flocks of frolicsome peewits, the heat of the midday sun has already made open water and currents.

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.

This is a watering-place.

Often, when in a famished condition, a transport of hunger which makes her lash her tail-fin round madly in a ceaseless search for food, she has stopped suddenly at the sight of a pair of big, thick legs stirring up the mud. It is a grazing bull or heifer that has come to the watering-place, and has splashed out far enough to be able to feel cool water under its nose.

One day when this occurred, the big-jointed legs and broad chest of the bull inspired Grim with hope, and her over-excited imagination began to conjure up the possibility of at last getting hold of something worth catching.

She steals forward, and her obliquely-set eye, which can look upwards with such ease, fastens, as though cast in that position, upon the great horned head of an ox.

She pushes on among the black cat’s-tails, hidden under the long-ribbed fans of weed, until she is just in front of the drinking animal, and can see through the glimmering surface of the water the sucking, fleshy nose.

At this she can no longer control her voracity. Where her stomach wills, her body must follow after. Her shrewdness may warn her, and experience urge her to caution, but in vain: when her stomach wills, she rushes into the fray.

The ox throws up its head with such violence that Grim is dragged up with it halfway; but she does not relax her hold, and when she sinks back into deep water, she takes a large piece of the ox’s snout with her.

The marsh, with its miles of reed-beds, was a favourite haunt of game, for coolness in the midsummer heat, and for warmth in the winter cold. Here were peaceful spots to hide when chased by men with the report of guns and the barking of dogs. And Grim knew how to benefit by this abundance of game.

Just as it had long been her way to snatch her prey by springing out of her element, so she now created a new means of support by lying in wait at the drinking-places like a crocodile.

Several times she molested horses when watering, and on one occasion she bit off half the tongue of a poor calf.

One afternoon a roe-deer comes down with its young. The day is hot, and they run far in, one of them, unable to stop, going in up to its chest. Grim darts up, seizes it by the body, overturns it, and then drags it out with her.

Another day a small dog suffers the same fate. It is caught by the fore-leg and drawn down, while a storm of rings spreads out on all sides.

All she had dreamed of in earliest youth has been realized; no prey is now too large for her.

When she moves slowly in the deep water, long waves rise above her, and whirlpools gyrate upon the coffee-coloured water; and if she shoots up on to the grass after a frog or a water-rat, and churns the water into foam, the whole pool is filled with breakers.

Grim is a remnant of primeval ages, a creature from the time of the great swamps.

Late in the autumn, when the dock was turning red, and the stiff spikes of the mare’s-tails were bent like withered grass, black autumn showers filled the marsh to overflowing. The wet mud lay far up over the meadows and pastures, and poured like rivers through the ditches. Pool ran into pool, and the peat-cuttings, which lay side by side, only separated by high, narrow ridges, became one huge pit. It was a regular deluge.

Grim swam far and wide, and almost fancied herself in the lake once more. She found her way into new oases where food was abundant, and made great inroads upon the numerous eels and tench that were flocking up from the brook through the ditches and channels. That autumn she really gained ground, and had something with which to withstand the winter.

But one day in October it happened that an osprey that had got out of its course strayed in over the marsh. The morning mist had just disappeared, but the sun was not quite up, when the grey-brown bird was seen sailing high up in wide circles, its mottled breast gleaming in the sunlight; and with a black, hooked beak beneath a pair of sharp, sagacious eyes.

The bird had come far and had not yet breakfasted; it came down nearer and nearer to the ground. All the little birds in the reeds began to cry out, and the coots sought shelter in the larger clumps of reeds. Like a kestrel, the bird kept at tree-height above the water, sailing backwards and forwards, keeping a sharp watch below.

There was frost in the air, and the great, hungry fisher probably had a presentiment of the bolt that would soon close its larder. In any case it was quite determined to take both little and big, and leave nothing.

It sailed on perseveringly from pool to pool, over the rushes in the muddy water and the bog-myrtle along the banks, moving slowly, with hanging claws.

Grim comes up from deep water on her morning round, making the most of her time while the shadows still conceal her and veil her movements. Now and again she stops and lies in wait among the water-plants, with her torn, dorsal fin, still but half healed, standing a little above the water.

On one of these occasions the osprey discovers her, and without recognizing what sort of a fish it is, hovers above the spot.

More than once it descends in vain, but is at last successful. Unobserved by Grim, the bird darts upon her from behind with outstretched claws, and drives them with full force into her back. It feels its claws sink in, and the pleasant struggling of something alive.

Its body is partly in the water, but the wings are quite clear, and it flaps vigorously, knowing it must lift its treasure with a quick movement.

A shudder passes through Grim. At the first moment she fancies herself attacked by some scaly enemy, and shakes herself and whirls round, snapping fiercely. But there is nothing to get hold of; the surface of the water seems, as it were, to hold her fast.

The osprey screams and beats his wings, sending up fountains of spray all round. Like others of his species, he is accustomed to master even the largest booty, and he still entertains the highest hopes and will not let go.

Then all at once danger is imminent! The rash captor notices that the sustaining volume of air beneath his wings is growing less. Now his wings are beating the water. He tries to get rid of his prey, but cannot get his claws out quickly enough; and the next moment he is drawn down and, to his terror, feels--what he has never quite believed--that water is not after all his true element.

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.