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!