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.
She cannot look at it unmoved. “After it!” say her eyes; “after it!”
echoes her empty stomach.
She does not succeed in seizing it across as she generally does, but
has to swim up and swallow it from behind in one mouthful.
It is a curiously sharp-spined little fish! Now that she has it in her
mouth, it is not nearly so tempting to her palate as it was before her
eyes. Well, she has taken the trouble to catch it, so down it shall go!
She cannot get it to move in her mouth; it will not stir! She takes a
firmer hold, turns with it, and hastens back into her hiding place.
Then it begins to bite her in the throat! And now--she becomes quite
uneasy--her throat suddenly tries to go the opposite way to her tail!
What can be the matter?
She forcibly sets her teeth into her refractory captive, when suddenly
she is pulled over.
How strange! The simple little pearly fish takes the form of a master,
and drags her after it through the water; no matter how much she tries
to back, no matter what powerful strokes she makes to force it to obey
her will, she is obliged to yield and go with it. Her brain is
bursting; she cannot comprehend this powerlessness: the fish is in her
mouth and on its way down her throat, and yet it is dragging her along
with it.
No! _No!_ And she sets to work and lashes the water into foam with her
tail; but the little pearly fish is inexorable; it is too strong for
her.
There must be some strange witchcraft about it all!
Instead of her swimming away with it, here it goes swimming away with
her, and on they go, nearer and nearer up towards the light and the
surface, which she instinctively shuns. All at once the pearly fish
leaps into the air with her. She wants to let go, to spit it out, but
she is too late; for the moment she is not quite conscious.
Her eyes ache; she feels as if they would jump out of her head. Her
sight is gone, and a bright red mist surrounds her. She tries to swim,
but cannot get her balance; she tries to strike with her tail in order
to escape, but the water round her offers no resistance.
A suffocating feeling seems suddenly to contract her gills; she cannot
open them far enough. She opens her mouth to let water in, but only
swallows dry wind.
The next moment she is lying floundering in a boat, and then a human
hand takes her up.
“A pickerel! undersized!” mutters the angler. And he carefully takes
out the revolving bait and weighs the fish in his hand. Alas! not even
a miserable two pounds!
He takes out his sheath-knife and marks her dorsal fin; and then, in
the hope of finding favour with the gods on account of his magnanimity,
and catching the fish again at some future time, he tosses her over the
side of the boat, and Grim is given back to life.
It was much the same feeling as when she was ejected from the heron’s
throat; her intestines seem bursting, and her breath to be leaving her.
Then she reaches the water, where she lies floating on her side, and
slowly wakens as though from a long fit of unconsciousness.
And in a trice she has disappeared into the depths.
Her suspicion was aroused. The world was full of villainies, more than
those that she herself committed!
Twilight was falling.
The sun’s fiery columns, that stood obliquely over the lake, suddenly
separated and flowed out, their glowing fragments lying like burning
oil upon the surface of the water. Then they were gradually
extinguished; the darkness of evening shed its deep blue tones over
them.
Long and black, the shadows crept out from the banks; the little fish
made their way in to the shelter of the reeds, and the pursuing pike
went to rest. And while the surface still sparkled with a peculiar
mother-of-pearl brilliancy, the darkness of night already brooded
closely beneath the water.
As quietly as a snail, a little crayfish was crawling over the bottom;
but it was more watchful than a polecat, and listened and felt its way
carefully. It came out from the rocky reef, and was now on its way over
the sandy plain in to the nearest bank.
_Nipper_ was a robber, encased in coat of mail; he spared nothing that
he thought he was big enough to overcome. A sharp, serrated dagger
projected above his jaws, and the pincers of his large claws were
half-open, ready to fasten upon the unwary prey.
He was a young crayfish, no longer than the span of a child’s hand, and
with a tail no broader than a finger. His eyes were stalked, and the
long, wide-straddling feeling carefully searched the bottom for more
than a body’s length in advance. The half-closed claws scraped over
rocks and water-lily roots in their efforts to drag the mailed body
along.
Suddenly there was a shock to his feelers. Nipper suspected danger, and
struck with his tail; and at once beginning to go backwards, he
hastily, with his front claws, stirred up a cloud of mud all round him.
Step by step, long and rapid, he hastened, without changing his
direction, back through the water.
It was only a false alarm, however; there was no otter or
water-rat--its worst enemies--close to the tips of it claws. It might
take things quietly, and safely set about its search for nocturnal prey
again. It stopped beating the water with its tail, and with extended
claws and tail outspread, it let itself sink slowly through the water.
Sedately and circumspectly, and with extreme caution, he felt his way
before advancing over the bottom of the lake on his clawed legs.
Nipper was descended from an old “backslider” that had been a monster
of the order of Decapoda, and had at last become so fat and heavy that
she could hardly swim, and preferred to crawl about. Like the rest of
her species, she had espoused a new male crayfish every other year; the
wedding generally took place in November, when out-of-door pleasures
were few, and everything, even the water, was cold and grey.
When the happy honeymoon was over, she always suddenly broke off all
relations with her spouse, and withdrew into one of the roomiest of the
numerous deep, dark, basement flats through the winter, waiting for the
sun and the white water-lilies to bring out her little children.
And they came!
Next summer a swarm of little creatures crept out of the eggs that
adhered in scores to her tail. From their birth they had tiny claws, a
tiny rostrum, and tiny feelers; and they were all an exact copy of
_him_. Holding fast with one claw to their mother’s poorly-developed
caudal legs, they hung as to a strap, while with the other claw they
fought among themselves as much as possible.
It was a little world of malice, cannibal cruelty, and good, healthy
egoism that the old monster thereafter dragged about with her, and she
defended it--to her praise it must be said--on every occasion against
the violence and malice of the outside world, by interposing her own
body.
Half without will of her own and unconsciously, she kept life in her
young. Every time she required food and drew it forward under her body,
the baby crayfish got a bit of it. On such occasions they let go of one
another, and struck out with his free claw, and hastily transferred the
morsel to his mouth.
Nipper had hung to one of the outside “straps” and he was with his
mother on the night she went into a crayfish trap. He let go the strap
in order to cram himself with both hands, and he did succeed in
producing a feeling of extraordinary satiety; but when the trap was
suddenly hauled up, he was not quick enough in taking hold again; the
water drew him with it, and washed him out through the wide-meshed net.
In this way he lost the shelter that in the natural order of things he
could still have reckoned on beneath the caudal fan of his great
parent; but fate had nevertheless been kind to him. While old Madam
Nipper, boiled red like a lobster and with lettuce round her tail, lay
that evening curled up on a dish, her little nipper was surrounded with
all the wonders of life; and he went at them with greedy claws and
flapping tail. It was not for nothing that he had been born with the
art of going backwards.
He had now lived through three winters, and was therefore not
altogether lacking in experience of life. He had successfully passed
the age in which his growth of no more than a few weeks made each
jacket-sleeve and trouser-leg too short, and had gone through nearly a
score of those dreadful “metamorphoses.” They were terrible bouts, real
illnesses that cost both toil and suffering. The last was still fresh
in his memory. He had suddenly become uneasy, could not even rest in
his hole. It was the same with them all; the same unrest seized upon
all the inhabitants of the crayfish-town that extended over the rocky
reef. None of them any longer ventured out at sunset; they remained
indoors. Then the illness began with an irresistible desire to scrape
and rub oneself. It was impossible to hold out against it; one had to
let it go its way and follow a certain system.
The “system” commenced with some wild movements of arms and legs.
Resting on the carapace and the big claws, the hind part of the body
was raised, and the tail spread, and then the thighs, legs, and ankles
were worked until a hole was made in the old, armour-like skin, and it
split up length-wise.
The transformation took days, so one had to sleep now and then, and
rest often. Food there was none.
One started up out of sleep, unable to rest for fear of being left in
the old skin and dying of starvation. Nothing for it but to go on, and
try to get over this most unpleasant process of moulting as quickly as
possible.
Nipper, who was endowed with all the courage and impatience of youth,
was one of the most eager to push on the business. He quickly got rid
of the armour-plates on his legs, and was now working to get out of his
tight coat-of-mail, throwing himself on his back, and rubbing himself
backwards and forwards upon the floor.
The coat-of-mail has already come away from the trouser-band, and he
can raise it from his body; he presses its stiff edges against a stone,
while he works himself backwards out of the old crayfish-case. First he
carefully releases both his stalked eyes, then come the feelers, and
then the big claws. Oh, but it hurts! And he shakes and twists himself,
sweating with exertion and anxiety. After all, it is going confoundedly
fast! Suppose a limb got into a tangle, or a joint refused to move!
Then it would break, as he very well knows: that kind of thing is a
part of the crayfish system!
At last the whole thing was accomplished, and he felt stronger and
freer than ever. This evening he would kill! This evening he would eat
his fill!
The darkness grew deeper The sinister shadows were already darkening
the banks, and the deep water, which before had shone with gleaming
mother-of-pearl, seemed now leaden-grey. There was not a water-lily
leaf to be seen on the surface; it was impossible to distinguish a
single green stalk.
Down on the soft mud, beneath a rotten, wrinkled tree-stump, sat a
fresh-water mussel with its shells half-open. As the round feelers of
the crayfish came gliding tentatively round its foot, it became aware
of the approach of an enemy, and had already almost closed its
broadly-gaping shells when Nipper, at the last moment, managed to
introduce the end of one of his broad pincers, like the heel of a boot
in a door. The mussel worked its hardest, straining till its shells
creaked and splinters actually broke off in its efforts to crush the
hard armour-plating of the claw.
Nipper lay as though petrified in front of his victim, and let the
mussel exhaust itself while he watched his opportunity to drive his
unimpressionable wedge farther and farther in. He had the patience of
Job, and knew that he only had to wait.
It was not long before he had succeeded in making room for his other
claw, and now he was cutting and picking at the body of the poor
mussel, one claw holding the pearly shells sufficiently wide apart for
the other to convey dainty pieces of mussel-flesh to his mouth.
At last the poor mussel’s strength is quite exhausted. It gives up, and
Nipper’s head and the front part of his body disappear inside the
shell.
Nipper remained there the first part of the night, cramming himself,
but at last could not help regretting that a mussel went such a little
way. He took a short rest, and then towards morning set out confidently
in search of more.
Unfortunately there were no sleepy, unprepared mussels to surprise; but
behind some stones in one of the deep, submarine mountain passes stood
a solitary fish, which had apparently got out of its course.
The quiet little Nipper had not much experience regarding the way in
which a crayfish catches fish; he was more accustomed to snails and
mussels. He could also seize a younger comrade in his claws, and suck
him dry, leaving nothing but his coat and trousers; but the finned
animal, with fans on back, belly, and tail, the nimblest of all--how
did one catch it?
He slyly pushes through a crack at the bottom of the cave, raises
himself on the points of his closed claws, and blinks with his
diverging eyes. He has turned back his feelers so that they shall not
betray him while he is investigating his immediate surroundings.
Grim is standing motionless with her head towards the current, leaving
her forked tail to keep her, with slight movements, on the same spot.
She is tired and exhausted after her long struggle with the pearly
fish, and feeling rather languid and out of sorts. Her lacerated mouth
hurts every time she opens it to rinse it with fresh water. She has,
therefore, sought shelter in the rocky cave to compose herself and
recover.
Something quivers along her breast and cautiously pricks her sides and
belly. It must be a waving grass-stalk!
Then a gradually-increasing, continuous pressure is suddenly felt round
the thick part of her tail.
With a sudden movement of her body she tries to shake off the supposed
reed, but at the same moment the pressure is felt like a bite from the
hard, sharp-edged beak of a heron. She struggles and writhes, and warps
herself out of the cave; and now she flies, fin-winged, through the
water.
Nipper is hanging to her stern. He has only hold with one claw, but
hopes to get the other, which he is waving about, also applied. His
tail-fan works incessantly.
Grim drags at full speed over stock and stone, and swings him out of
one gyration into another; through reed-beds and undergrowth, and far,
far into the forest of water-weed; but he hangs on still!
He feels, however, that his prize is rather more than he can manage.
There is no time left for him to pick at the fish’s flesh with his
other claw; he was growing quite dizzy, for he was not accustomed to
going _forward_ at such a pace!
Then he stretches out his free claw to seize hold of a root, and thus
try to chain his captive to the bottom.
But the trick does not succeed. The jerk that follows is so violent
that he loses his claw!
He has now lost his chance, and lets go.
Grim feeling herself relieved of his weight, and free in her movements,
darts away with the speed of a run-away engine. In addition to the
soreness of her mouth, she now has a pain in her tail. She will need
some time to recover from both.
Things had gone against her, and to tell the truth she did not think
there was much fun in being a fish; but then she had to learn her
lesson, and once bitten, twice shy, both in and above the water.
The recollection of the strange little pearly fish long remained in her
memory. Its stiff body, and continual turning about its own dorsal fin,
without a single stroke of the tail, were long imprinted on her mind;
and whenever afterwards the “tit-bit” appeared, her wounded mouth
assured her voracious stomach that it was wiser to refrain.