Part 7
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.
As she does so, she feels as if an eel were winding its pliant body round her chest. She rolls round, unable to use her fins. She quickly regains her balance, however, frees her body from the pressure, and sets off, with sudden twists, and leaps from the bottom to the surface, turning so suddenly that the fish-snatcher’s body swings out and hangs down in the water.
But the otter only keeps a firmer hold. He is used to these desperate rallies, which always become fiercer and more violent as the quarry is on the point of giving in. He takes care, however, in turning, not to let any of his legs hang in front of the pike’s mouth; he is too well acquainted with the teeth of the fresh-water shark!
Up and down, the two well-matched opponents dive incessantly.
Whenever Grim goes to the surface, a puffing and growling is heard. The otter hastily gasps for breath, and tightens his hold with his fore-claws; but when they are on their way down to the depths, and air-bubbles, like silver beads, roll through the water behind him, he has only to hold on and let himself go.
Once Grim is lucky. An old snag sticks up in the water, and, in turning, the otter’s body is dashed against it. It sends a shock through the animal, but as Grim for the moment has exhausted her energy and succumbed to one of the well-known fits of weakness common to her species, the otter once more apparently gets the upper hand.
Thus with varying fortunes the battle rages for some time.
They lie fighting on the surface--a golden-streaked, slimy, scaly fish twisted into a knot with a dark, hairy, furred body!
Once more there is a pause in the fighting.
Unobserved by Grim, who has just fallen into one of her apathetic fits, the otter endeavours carefully to float the pike up under one of the large mounds, in order to drag her up with an effort of strength on to dry land; but the attempt fails utterly: he is simply unable to manage so great a load.
Now Grim’s strength returns once more. With a powerful stroke of her tail, she disappears with lightning rapidity from the surface, and goes to the bottom with her rider, whose merry-go-round jaunt makes his head swim. She is trying to get hold of his leg or body, and therefore twists round with him so that he flaps like a loose piece of strap on an axle; but she is not sufficiently supple to reach him. Her back aches, her flexor muscles hurt. At last she has met with an opponent who puts her judgment, her ingenuity, and her endurance to the extreme test.
Down on the bottom, sticking out from the bank, are the roots of the willow-bushes on the edge. In her mad rush down, Grim has come near these, and instinctively seeks shelter beneath them. At full speed she runs her long body into the network and sticks fast, rapidly twisting her tail-screw both ahead and astern.
The otter treads water now on the right, now on the left side of her, and tries, by utilizing the roots as steps, to lift her up with him. But in vain; he cannot even stir the huge fish!
His teeth are still far from having forced their way through; it seems as if, short and rounded as they are, they cannot reach the bottom. But he makes tremendous exertions, whipping his tail in under the peat-bank, while with his hind paws he seeks for support in clefts and cracks. Suddenly he feels one of his feet seized. The grasp tightens, so that his whole leg aches; he tries to draw in his foot, but it is held immovable.
A monster crayfish, that has become so stiff with age that it can scarcely manage to strike a proper blow with its tail, has made for itself, in fear of Grim, a reliable place of refuge in the hole. For a long time it has patiently followed the battle through its feelers, and hoped that some morsel would fall to its hungry stomach; now, with gratitude to Providence, it closes its great claw upon the warm-blooded fisher.
A growing uneasiness steals over the otter. He had once been caught by the tip of one claw in an otter-trap. The trap was heavy, and had dragged him under water; and he had only escaped at the last moment. With the grasp on his leg, his lungs begin to warn him, his throat contracts, and his eyes seem on the point of bursting. Up! Up! With or without his prey!
He has let go of Grim, and now makes his escape from the hole with so sudden a jerk that the old crayfish accompanies him; but the dread of water, which no living being that breathes with lungs can quite overcome, has taken possession of the otter. With all possible speed he slips out from among the roots, and is already rising; and as he approaches the surface and finds the blessed light beating more and more strongly upon the mud about his eyes, he hastens his flight, until, with an eager sniff, he reaches the surface.
Grim is close behind him, and as the otter lands, there is a loud splash. It would have been all over with the brown beast if the old crayfish, on its way down from the surface, where it had at last let go its hold, had not dropped like a stone straight into Grim’s mouth. Grim has now to content herself with sending her opponent a cold, dull, fishy glance, and let the Nipper continue its journey down into her draw-bag.
The wound that the old giant pike had received was not a dangerous one. True, there were two rows of deep cuts made by a pair of thick, round-toothed jaws in the flesh on one side of her back; but they healed like so many others that she had had in her time. Her back, however, was tender for days after, and she found it a little difficult to leap.
The impudent, four-footed fisher never went hunting again in _her_ water-hole. The otter felt quite sure that it was only by good fortune that it had not been annihilated by its great, dangerous rival.
XIV: THE ANGLER FROM TOWN
The lake had changed since the old angler’s death; its former peace and poetry were gone. The big swimming-birds had multiplied tremendously, and dashed about restlessly every day, swallowing the fish by means of constantly improving implements.
One of the latest of these was a ten-horsepower motor-boat, manned by a little, sinewy man, thin and elastic, and with a superabundance of energy. He was a journalist by profession, and editor of a paper; the hurry and unrest of a new age burned in him; whether he wrote or refreshed himself with sport, he did it with the same strength and enthusiasm.
Grim’s first captor had been an old-style votary of the rod and line; he loved to cast anchor in some quiet spot, light his pipe, and sit watching his lines. The journalist from town was of the very opposite temperament, constantly rushing about and hauling in and making fresh casts elsewhere.
He had taken a house for the summer by the lake, and among the red-currant bushes in the garden he had set up his little aquarium, which contained a couple of crayfish, a few perch, and a young pike.
Every morning he dug up worms for his aquarium-fish, and fed them carefully.
If neither pike nor perch touched the worms, and the crayfish did not take them either when they sank to the bottom, he tranquilly devoted himself to his work all day; but if the reverse happened, then the leading article would be short; the editor was occupied elsewhere.
One day, when he was sitting in his office in town, the telephone rang. His wife was at the other end of the wire, and told him that the pike was feeding like mad.
He thrills at the news. His paper has long had news about Grim, the mysterious monster. The expedition is all prepared, his tackle is in order; he has only been waiting for the signal from the aquarium.
A few hours later the enthusiastic little man, after a forced bicycle-ride under the scorching sun of a suffocating July day, finds himself among fragrant iris and bog-myrtle. Accompanied by a local peat-digger, who, from fear of the monster, has armed himself with a gun, he turns off by one of the paths.
The wind is blowing through the local jungle, and rustling its myriads of leaves with a sound that to the editor’s ears resembles the continual crumpling of a huge newspaper. The stiff, bluish-green rushes, with their black joints, bend caressingly about him, and the strong, spicy scent of wild mint, mingled with the sharp, acrid vapour from the bog, ascends to his nostrils.
For a moment he stands among the rushes, drawing deep breaths as he listens enraptured to the deafening music of nature. The larks are carolling above his head, and the wild ducks rise with a great deal of splashing and fuss; now a snipe comes sailing past and sinks in a long, concave curve.
A sunbeam finds its way into the jungle, and showers a cascade of shifting, dancing patches of light over him. He perspires and pants, and wipes his forehead; he blows his nose after the manner of primitive man; he has once more become the kind of being that the Almighty called Man, when He placed him on the earth.
At an opening in the rushy margin, where an old, fern-clad ridge runs out into the water, he gets his rod ready.
And now let Grim beware! Here comes a fisherman with shrewdness and intelligence! His clothes are the colour of the heron’s feathers, his rod painted sky-blue, and his line is grey-green like the long stalks of the water-plants.
He creeps along the mossy, boggy bank, taking care to avoid all disturbance of the water. The pike is timid, and easily put to flight, watchful and agile; if he only breaks a reed, if he only lets a snail-shell drop into the water, it will perceive him. He finds out places where he thinks the fish is lying, and expectantly drops his bait beyond the edge of the reeds on the point of land.
The peat-cutter follows him at some distance. He has strict orders on no account to utter a syllable, and to tread with extreme caution and care. He has his gun all ready, for he is thinking with misgiving of all the stories he has heard about the fabulous “serpent.” He recollects that Sidse, old Anders’ girl, has seen it. She was watering the cows when it shot up out of the deep water with a splash, and shook itself like a dog. She had distinctly heard the jingling of the scales in its mane.
And Ole, the wheelwright, too.
“Such a head!” he had said. “As big as a calf’s! And the skin round the corners of its mouth all in great, thick folds!” As to its eyes, he had said they were yellow like those of a hare.
He must remember to tell _that_ to the newspaper-man.
At that moment he hears a warning whistle, the signal to stop and remain where he is, so as not to spoil possible chances by his sudden appearance.
An electric shock has darted through the sportsman, and for a moment he stands as if petrified, in keen suspense.
He has felt a bite, and with lowered rod he slowly and carefully lets out plenty of line.
The pike has taken the bait, or so he firmly believes; but he waits minute after minute, and the line never moves.
Alas! the hook is caught in something! His best and strongest hook, selected from among hundreds for this very expedition! In vain he employs every artifice; he cannot free it. He will have to give up his fishing and abandon the line.
What an embarrassing story to have to tell! People have such nasty tongues. And the peat-digger over there! No, that would be too much! Besides, this suffocating heat has long tempted him to have a bath out here, so he promptly strips and goes in. He is swimming along the edge of the reeds where there is a little open water, when all at once he feels his left leg seized. It is as though a pair of garden shears had suddenly cut into it!
Involuntarily he begins to shout and kick, but the next moment he is dragged out and down towards deep water. He feels the teeth of the monster sinking deeper and deeper into his leg, and is on the point of losing his senses as he cries aloud for help.
The peat-cutter hurries up with all possible speed, just in time to catch the outline of a long, black shadow, working under water. At haphazard he fires off both charges. At the same time the editor shrieks still more horribly, and raises himself in the water. A cold, sharp edge, as of a knife, is drawn along his body, as Grim, frightened by the shots, disappears beneath him.
Other peat-cutters come up, and together they pull the unfortunate editor ashore. The blood is spouting from his leg in several places, but one of the men ties his trouser-strap round it. Some one telephones for a doctor, a carriage is fetched, and the editor is then driven to his home.
The wound was a serious one. The doctor had to wash and bandage it. On the outer side of the calf, the deep marks of Grim’s upper teeth were visible, in two rows at a distance of more than a hand’s breadth from one another, wound after wound, going deep into the flesh. It was clearly the bite from the jaws of some great animal.
The oracle’s prophecy that the editor would get a bite had in truth been fulfilled!
* * * * *
This occurrence put fresh life into the stories circulating in the district about the escaped crocodile, or the serpent, or the dragon, that always frequented black bogs.
The monster must be removed. For a long time cattle and horses had not been safe when they came to the watering-places; and now it attacked people when bathing!
What sort of an animal was it?
People demanded that the local board should provide them with an ocular demonstration.
Several of the holes were emptied, but they were the wrong ones. Through others nets were drawn with a team of horses at each end. Grim was almost caught two or three times, and only saved herself by burrowing into the mud, and letting the net pass over her.
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.