In the creek where she lived among rushes and reeds, a shoal of perch
had their abode. They were scarcely as big as she, but much thicker and
older. Their leader in particular, by whose movements the whole flock
were guided, was a broad bellied high-backed fellow, who knew the value
of the weapon of defence he possessed in his strong, spiny dorsal fin.
He had a peculiar power of varying his colour so that it always suited
the light in the water and on the bottom. There were days when he
looked an emerald green, without any brassy tinge; at other times he
let the black flickerings along his sides stand out like the stripes on
a zebra’s skin, and gave a brilliancy to his belly like that of the
harvest moon. That was for fine weather. There was life in the water
then!
But common to them all were the rough, rasping scales that grew close
up round the carroty-red fins, and the round yellow eyes with
coal-black pupils, which seemed to rest on cushions and roll outside
the head so that the fish could see both up and down.
The perch were quite as rapacious as Grim herself; they poached upon
her small-fish preserves, and often disturbed her in the chase. Had she
only been equal to it, she would gladly have devoured some of them,
too.
One evening when she was so hungry that she under-estimated everything,
she saw her chance of attacking their dark-hued leader, but _Rasper_,
becoming aware of his dilemma, defended himself with the energy of a
bulldog. The combat was on the point of turning in his favour, when
Grim disappeared from view by taking a bold salmon-leap high into the
air. After that they always swam scowling past one another at a
respectful distance; but Grim was well aware that the striped swimmer
had no friendly feeling towards her.
As she grew bigger, and felt herself more and more the powerful despot,
whose dental armature had been provided simply and solely for the
purpose of biting others, her hatred of the high-backed one
instinctively became greater. They were of such widely different
natures!
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.
[Illustration: “She snaps eagerly at the nearest ‘worm,’ but it escapes
her by adroitly curling up.”]
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.