XIII: A FIGHT WITH AN OTTER

The harrier was sitting on her newly-hatched young, and the pair of crows were feeding theirs for the last time; it was the time of the owls--and the nightingales. Silent and weary, the cuckoo came from the meadow-land to the bog, where the twilight enveloped it and hid it on its branch.

The willow-thickets and the rushes settled gradually into cool and shade; only along the promontories and banks, where the dragonflies hunted, did the mid-summer sunlight still hold its ground.

The water began to sparkle with strong, bright colours, and patches of yellow, scarlet, and blue floated about, shot with brilliant flakes of emerald and purple, which gave darkened reflections of the birch-tops.

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.