Grim: The Story of a Pike

by Svend Fleuron

She swam just below the surface of the water, and looked with interest at the varied scenery of the bottom and all the unfamiliar and strange things that presented themselves. How delightful it was to let herself go and give her fins free play!

She reached a rocky reef, and swam over a group of high, wild mountains that rose steeply out of the black bottom ooze with rugged sides, wooded in parts, and in others barren and naked. The mountains were full of deep ravines, the ice of centuries of winters’ freezing of the bottom had furrowed them with crests and clefts, planed off the points of the summits, and formed rounded tops or plateaux.

Here and there in this rocky land with its numerous winding inlets and sharp corners, a conspicuous stump stuck up. Several of them had a ring at one end, and from a few waved a bit of rope. In the course of time they had dropped down from the other world. They were lost boat-hooks and anchors that had become hopelessly fixed; for the rocky reef was a good fishing-ground.

There were many crayfish in the lake, and Grim, as she swam, had a bird’s-eye view of them walking about, swarming over the bottom of the lake in all directions, laboriously measuring out the kilometres in crayfish steps.

In several places there were whole towns of them, and in the perpendicular cliffs on the deep side of the reef, there was a large crayfish population. Here she noticed certain specimens, larger than she cared about. They lay in wait among the rocks or in the depths of the primeval forest, and caught what fish they could in their deadly claws. Or they ran backwards through the water with claws and feelers extended, step by step and with a beat of the tail; if the waves they set up had not warned her in time, they might have run into her at any moment.

From the reef she passed on over a great sandy desert, where the worms lay in rings, and the fresh-water mussels in colonies. She came upon some unpretending and not very luxuriant plants with swinging stalks that could turn with the current and the waves; but what struck her most, and broke the monotony more than anything else, was the skeleton remains of animals, boats, and a few human beings, that lay scattered about.

Where the substratum of the rocky reef still extended under the sand without disappearing altogether, she saw these slowly-perishing remains of the meteors from the air-world, lying scoured and clean as on a tray. In the eyeholes of the skulls the crayfish sheltered when they rested on their long journey over these perilous wastes, and perch lurked in the shadow of the ribs.

Farther out, where current and drifting sand alternately had the mastery, things were incessantly being uncovered and reburied; and in the middle of the desert waste, where there were quicksands, sometimes an arm would project from the sand-dunes, sometimes a leg, or the frontal bone of a skull bearing a huge pair of horns, or the prow of a boat. Finally, the desert ended in a whole skeleton reef--the remains of a drove of animals that a dozen years before had lost their way in the drifting snow and the dark, taken a short cut over the ice, and fallen through.

Once beyond this, the fertile bottom, with black soil, plants and little fish, began again. Then came a new, high-lying land, not stony and rough like the first, but rich and luxuriant. It lay outside a projecting point of land, of which it formed the natural continuation under the water.

On each side of the point a long creek stretched far inland, the scenery under the water being a repetition of that above. A luxuriance and fertility was visible on all sides; the water-grass waved in stretches like corn in the fields, and the giant growths of the water-forests were like the shady trees on land.