In the front of the lower jaw, the teeth stood thick as pins in a pincushion. They were small and pointed, and sloped backwards, so that they served as barbs. In along the sides came the long, widely-separated incisors, whose purpose was to enter into and hold fast the prey. They were more than half an inch in length, rounded and blunt, and resembled the teeth of a rake.
The upper jaw was provided with a far more terrible armature. Whole rows of harrow-like teeth stood out, making a diabolical grater of the palate. They continued far down the throat, and even came forward over the tongue. Woe to the body that became jammed here! It was only released as mince-meat.
But the throat that swallowed the victim was by far the most horrible contrivance.
It resembled the drawn-up mouth of a sack. Down through it lay great rolls of swallowing-muscles, studded with grasping protuberances. In the midst of them the œsophagus was discernible, its aperture incessantly opening and closing with a suction that inexorably drew everything down with it.
And her external equipment corresponded to her internal. The wonderful, dark colours of the shallows drew a broad stripe along her great back. About the forehead and along the back of the neck, the water-grasses had laid a ground-wash of their own deep green; and her sides were veiled by the flickering streaks of the reed-beds. Patches of gold, like the sunshine falling through the glassy surface of the water, shone out between the transverse stripes on her sides; and over the branchial arch and the belly lay the pure whiteness of the water-lily.
Yes, she was adorned in all her splendour. Her scales gleamed with the rays of the sun and moon; and when, with the rapidity of lightning, she made a dart, it seemed like the twinkling of stars in the dark night of the deep waters.
From this time onwards, her voracity knew no bounds. The desire for food, which she had possessed from her earliest days, and which had lain like a germ in the very heart of her nature, was given free play by means of the terrible weapons that Nature had placed at her disposal. No one else should now get a bite; she would be alone in clearing the waters of food.
She now as readily seized her prey lengthwise as cross-wise; indeed, she even preferred, when hungry, to make straight for the head; by so doing, she wasted no time in turning it, but could swallow it at once.
By nature she was very reserved, and had no desire for companionship; but her mental abilities were by no means small, and she was well able to make various observations, and profit by their lessons. Nor was she deficient in memory, as she distinctly showed every spring when going to spawn; she always found her way up the brook to the wide fen.
She was very sensitive to every movement in the water, and in a way heard with ease the boats, “the big birds.” They always splashed so much with their oar-feet, or whisked their tail round in the water. She had often wondered at them! She had discovered that, like the grebe, they carried their young on their back; and, like all the other fish in the lake, she supposed them to be a part of the unrest up on the surface.