VIII: THE ANGLER’S END

It was so natural for Grim to be once more splashing freely in the lake; it was so natural for her to be feeding on roach again. She should have learned a lesson from her adventure in the air with the man, but the qualifications were lacking.

Her senses, and her power of discrimination, however, had become keener, and she grew more timid and watchful in regard to splashing and noise; indeed, she quite lost her appetite when she was frightened.

The time was past when she would confidently approach the shadow of a boat, she was exceedingly cautious now when she saw the “great bird” on the water.

By this time she weighs about eighteen pounds, and measures the length of a grown man’s leg from hip to heel; her dorsal fin measures more than two hand-breadths, and it would take a large hand to span her back.

She loves peace and quiet, and feels very irritable under the influence of others.

On the approach of storm and bad weather, which she perceives a long time in advance, she generally retires into deep water, where the noise of the waves cannot reach her. She feels indisposed and ill, and remains motionless in her watery lair. Day after day she stays thus, without feeling hunger, or any desire for action. She sleeps and lets all her nerves and muscles rest; only her gills and fins keep working mechanically.

At such times the angler may try to tempt her with spoon or other artificial bait, or with live fish, but she will not touch them! One tempting little decoy-fish after another may whisk past her nose, but both palate and stomach easily withstand the temptations that are placed before her surfeited eyes.

But when the weather calms down and the waves once more grow less, she comes to life again, and is then well and rested. The storm has cleared her blood; she needs food and exercise, and is biting madly.

One afternoon the angler is sitting in his boat with all his rods and lines out; he is smoking a pipe and listening to the loud “karr-karr” of the grebes.

As usual he is alone in the boat.

He has anchored off his favourite bank, a narrow reef which, in the shelter of the wood, runs far out into the lake. This fishing-ground, which in windy weather is the richest in the lake, he has discovered himself.

It was hard work getting out to it! The gusts of wind came down upon him unexpectedly as he bounded over the water in his little green-painted boat. Suddenly the lake assumed a wilder aspect, the great wave-mountains were broken up into small pieces, and the valleys were filled with wrinkles. The boat quivered, and the angler started and let the main-sail down, while the black wind from the frayed clouds raged under the heavens.

Now the weather is clearing, however, and the lake is calming down--real fishing weather, thinks the angler, and he hums the old angler’s song:

“When the wind is in the east, ’Tis neither good for man nor beast; When the wind is in the south, It blows the bait in the fishes’ mouth.”

The terns, with their long forked tails and black caps rise and fall in the air around him. They are good Samaritans to all the half-dead bait he from time to time throws overboard. The poor little ill-used things hastily make for the shadow of the boat or take up a position beside a floating weed. They want to hide because they feel weak; they do not want to go down into deep water to Oa. Then the terns snap them up, and put them down their little red throats.

Three or four of them are pursuing, with shrieks and snarls, another which is flying away with a little bleak, like a piece of white stick in its jaws. It reminds the fisherman of a heron he once shot at, and which sent out a shower of such half-dead little fish.

At that moment he has a bite at one of his lines. The line runs off the reel at a great pace, and the rod, which rests on the row-lock, but with its thick end wedged under a board at the bottom of the boat, bends like a flag-leaf and dips its point down into the water.

He seizes the rod and lifts it. The line is running out at full speed. He carefully checks it, making the resistance stronger and stronger, so as to prevent the fish from breaking the line with a sudden jerk.

Grim has taken the bait, and is now darting about with it. She had been hungry after three days’ storm and wind, and had therefore rushed blindly at the lure. Alas, it is another of those prickly fish, she notices at once, one of those confounded tit-bits that are only to be looked at, but which neither teeth nor throat are ever glad to deal with; and she opens her mouth and chokes and spits.

She gets rid of the fish she had snatched; she sees it, half dead and with long rents in its sides from her teeth, floating on its side with a reddish yellow eye turned up towards her through the water. But the prickly thorn that she took in at the same time is fixed in her jaw.

She darts hither and thither, turning and twisting. Now she is down in deep water, rubbing her wounded mouth upon the bottom, now she darts, with the bubbles in her wake rising above her, round a clump of water-lilies.

The angler sees an island of leaves as big as a dining-table disappear.

Then she is off again. The reel shrieks and hums as if a giant grasshopper sat chirping in it. All at once, Grim leaps out of the water high into the air, so that her golden, black-streaked body, with the panther-like spots and the trickling water-drops, casts a gleam over the lake.

Never had the good man seen such a fish! The very waves that it raises as it returns to the water, breaking the surface like a submarine, show him that it is--as he is accustomed to express it--“one of the good old-fashioned sort.” He continues to gaze open-mouthed at the place where it disappeared, while a flurry of rings spreads out in all directions.

A little later a whirlpool appears on the seething water, and he catches a glimpse of a dorsal fin with the hinder point missing. Then the old fisherman rejoices. A marked fish, one of his oldest, perhaps his biggest!

He winds in, lets the line run out, and winds in again. His big body is perspiring with his exertions, and he has to stand with his legs wide apart and his feet firmly fixed whenever the mighty fish gives one of its sudden jerks.

While this is going on there are bites on two of the perch-lines, and the angler can see they are not small fish either. The lines, which are lying loose over the gunwale, run out at a great pace, so that the winders hop and dance about at the bottom of the boat. One of them is jerked over the edge, so that fish, hooks, and line are lost; the other he tries to make sure of by setting his foot upon it.

Like the back of a cat about to spring, the rod bends under its floundering burden. The old man has to keep on incessantly slacking and tightening the line; hoping to tire out the fish that was dragging his rod from one side to the other.

He notes the smallest movement of his captive. It is still in full vigour, and there are many water-plants and stalks in the way. Will he be able to draw it from the deep water with his fine, fragile line?

Suddenly Grim turns and darts in beneath the boat with such force that the rod must either break or follow her. The angler chooses to let it go in the hope of picking it up on the other side.

It happens as he expected: the rod appears, floats up; he leans over and reaches it.

The fight and nervous excitement recommence--the quick, exciting contest between man and fish.

The wind plays its autumn hymn upon the rushes, and ruffles the water between the yellow-spotted water-lily leaves, while the sun’s rays, as they come and go, light flaming torches among the trees and reeds. They gleam, they sparkle, they flash; and great, heavy, September clouds drift over the lake.

At last the shrewd fisherman has the upper hand, and cautiously draws his captive close up to the boat. He bends down, with his knees upon the gunwale, and leans over with the landing-net, in his right hand.

Grim suddenly finds herself close to the great “water-bird,” and gives a violent jerk. The fisherman reaches out with his arm, and the upper part of his body as far as they will go; but he forgets that he is in a boat and on unsafe ground, loses his balance, and falls overboard with a splash, upsetting the boat as he does so.

No one sees the accident, and his heavy waders drag him quickly down.

Grim darts this way and that, winding the line round him and drawing him to the bottom. And then, among the rocks of the reef, the line breaks; the angler’s body drifts in among the reeds.

Towards evening the sky becomes overcast and the troubled water looks thick and muddy. Little waves leap up, stand for a moment at their height as if trying to keep their balance, and then give up the attempt and roll down.

A solitary little sunbeam still now and again brightens up all the grey-veiled colours, and then the water takes the hues of a fallow-deer, and the water-lily leaves become floating patches of rainbow.

In the muddy valley between the bottom-springs, Oa is beginning to move. She blinks her cunning eyes, and their blue-black pupils become large and round. Then she sets out on a nocturnal expedition across the lake, steals into the rocky grottos of the cloister-cells, and finds a new hiding-place beneath the wreck of a boat--a new arrival. With her snout just in the rent between the bottom and the gunwale, she lies like a dog in its kennel, until night closes in and all is dark and silent.

Then she lets herself slowly drift along the edge to the reedy borders of the lake, taking every drowned dog or cat as gifts from the Creator’s hand.

Everything that has no longer the power to keep above the water, all that is dead and drifts about, belongs to the crayfish and to her.

The Nipper had already found the body when Oa arrived.