Another couple of seconds and the prey is near.
Then Grim makes her first real leap. It is successful. Ever since she was the length of a darning-needle, she had dreamt of this leap, dreamt that it would be successful.
The sedge-warbler in the reedy island heard the splash, and the closing snap of the jaws. They closed with such firmness that the bird could feel, as it were, the helpless sigh of the victim, and the grateful satisfaction of the promising young pirate.
She was the tiger of the water. She would take her prey by cunning and by craft, and by treacherous attack. She was seldom able to swim straight up to her food. How could she chase the nimble antelopes of the lake when, timid and easily startled, they were grazing on the plains of the deep waters; they discovered her before she got near them and could begin her leap!
Huge herds were there for her pleasure. She had no need to exert herself, but could choose her quarry in ease and comfort. The larger its size, and the greater the hunger and lust for murder that she felt within her, the more violence and energy did she put into the leap. But just as the falcon may miss its aim, so might she, and it made her ashamed, like any other beast of prey; she did not repeat the leap, but only hastened away.
But when her prey was struggling in her hundred-toothed jaws and slapping her on the mouth with its quivering tail-fin, then slowly, and with a peculiar, lingering enjoyment, she straightened herself out from her bent leaping posture. If she was hungry, she immediately swallowed her captive, but if not, she was fond, like the cat, of playing with her victim, swimming about with it in her mouth, twisting and turning it over, and chewing it for hours before she could make up her mind to swallow it.
She ate, she stuffed herself; and with much eating she waxed great.
[III: GRIM GOES EXPLORING]
In the creek where she lived among rushes and reeds, a shoal of perch had their abode. They were scarcely as big as she, but much thicker and older. Their leader in particular, by whose movements the whole flock were guided, was a broad bellied high-backed fellow, who knew the value of the weapon of defence he possessed in his strong, spiny dorsal fin.
He had a peculiar power of varying his colour so that it always suited the light in the water and on the bottom. There were days when he looked an emerald green, without any brassy tinge; at other times he let the black flickerings along his sides stand out like the stripes on a zebra’s skin, and gave a brilliancy to his belly like that of the harvest moon. That was for fine weather. There was life in the water then!