The active little pike is still too far off the big pirate’s teeth; it must be enticed nearer, so that she can be certain when she strikes.
Grim does not respond to the invitation, however, but prefers to try the other “worm,” and when that, too, with a rapidity unusual in a worm, curls up into a ball and goes to the bottom, she instinctively grows suspicious, and sets her tail-screw going, just as the cunning water-hyena throws off its mask of mud, and makes a wild dash at her.
“She snaps eagerly at the nearest ‘worm,’ but it escapes her by adroitly curling up.”
Grim flees precipitately--so terrified that her cold blood almost stiffens--and darts out of the black cloud that Oa in her eagerness has raised.
The entire hollow seems alive now; everything is gliding and rocking, everything is moving beneath her; she seems to be swimming in black darkness with an angry, gaping, sucking mouth close behind her. She has to keep up full speed with her tail, and to paddle with all her fins, fore and aft, to avoid being drawn in.
When the water begins to clear, and daylight returns, she finds herself in the middle of a shoal of gay little fish, which, at her sudden appearance among them, scatter like a flock of starlings at the dart of a sparrow-hawk down among them. She feels the seething and boiling from the quick flapping of tiny tails; and involuntarily she goes with them, swimming away as quickly as the most nimble of the shoal, to a large, wide-spreading island of reeds.
Here Grim remained for a month, during which time she calmed down, and came to a full understanding of her own cruel, voracious nature.
One day, when she was proceeding along the border of her new beat, she came upon some precipitous cliffs, standing stone upon stone straight up from the bottom, full of holes and openings. She swam into large, slimy-green caverns and lofty grottos. It was the ruin of the old monastery she had found.