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.
Gradually, as the large, pointed steel hook enters farther and farther
into Grim’s intestines, and makes her cold, red blood flow the wrong
way, her movements become less and less rapid.
The water makes things dim; she no longer sees clearly, and runs full
tilt into banks and clumps of reeds. She feels delightfully surfeited,
and darts about the pool with the sensation of dragging with her the
greatest booty she had ever taken in her life. How it seems to fill her
stomach! At last, _at last_ she is satiated, so that her throat seems
ready to burst and her jaws to part asunder; and all at once she
notices the same strange over-burdened feeling that she had had that
day many years ago, when in greed she had swallowed the big perch.
Wildly and recklessly she drags on the rope, careering around with her
little captor; but every time she jerks him off an island, or through
thickly-matted vegetation, she drives the point of the iron nearer to
her heart. At last, in the fever of death, she rushes right in to the
bank, and runs the boy aground on an island of reeds.
She lies floating just below the surface, and Rasmus, who now and then
between the water-plants catches sight of her greenish-yellow belly and
black-spotted tail-fin, cries out in terror.
* * * * *
The old pike of many adventures is wandering in her mind. Is it the
big, black perch that she has at last succeeded in consuming? Is it the
bull with horns? Or is it one of the big swimming-bird’s young?
Yes, _that_ is it! This time she has succeeded in getting hold of its
long leg, and has at last swallowed it and has it safely in her
stomach.
But it weighs her down, so that she can no longer keep in a horizontal
position. Yes, she feels that distinctly; it is so tremendously
satisfying that her tail is sinking and her head rising, and now all at
once she rises slowly and stiffly from the water.
The boy almost goes crazy at the sight, and involuntarily covers his
eyes with his hands, so fantastically horrible does it appear. Out of
the black, muddy water and the purple, poisonous-green plants from
which the gases of decomposition release great, bladdery bubbles,
stands out Grim’s huge, crocodile head, cold and staring.
The flabby, wrinkled skin of the throat vibrates with her violent,
convulsive gulps, and the lower jaw of more than arm’s length is pushed
out beyond the upper, exposing to view the extreme points of a row of
long, dagger-like teeth at the shrunken corners of the mouth.
The monster now turns slowly on her axis, her big, expressionless,
watery eye, looking, with its dirty grey colour, like an unwashed
window in an empty, deserted house, projects, fixed and blind, from her
huge head.
The iron has reached her swimming-bladder, and robbed her of the power
of navigation. She grows dizzy, and like a great float at the bite of a
big fish, she goes down silently and straight.
* * * * *
A man busy ploughing heard the boy’s cry, and running up, learned what
was the matter: a monster of an animal, that Rasmus could not pull up,
had sailed over half the bog with him!
The man fished up the plank, and helped the boy ashore. Then he fetched
his horses, harnessed them to the line, and drew Grim slowly, but
surely, up on to the bank.
She lay that night moored to a birch-tree. Life was long since extinct.
A message was telephoned to the innkeeper, who collected items of news
for the editor’s paper, “that Peter Jenn’s son had caught, under the
strangest circumstances, a specimen of the great sea-serpent. It
resembled a prehistoric toad rather than a fish of the present day.”
The following day the whole district gathered at the spot, and the
schoolmaster appeared with a man of science who had been summoned.
“Why, it’s a pike,” said the professor, as soon as he saw it, “an
unusually large and old specimen, it is true, but still only a pike.”
And it must be confessed that he felt a little hurt at having been
called out on so long a journey for nothing.
For many years afterwards Rasmus was the hero of the village, and from
that day he never went by the name of Rasmus Jenn, but was called
Rasmus Pike.