Long before they came near her, she was distinctly aware of their approach.
If she were high in the water, and the bird suddenly rushed down towards her, she darted to one side and hastened out of the way. It was different when the boat came slowly gliding along; then she only moved so as not to be run down.
But it was many a day before she came to understand that it was they especially who wanted to harm her.
One evening the old angler was rowing home late from his fishing-ground. The moon had risen, and shed her silvery light around his oars. They dipped down rhythmically, and came up with the silver dripping from them. Suddenly he noticed that one of them struck something, and the shock passed through the oar up into his arm. He was dragging something heavy, and could not bring the oar forward; and then he pulled the head of a pike up above the water. At the same moment the fish dropped, and the oar was free; but Grim was wiser after that.
As the years passed she developed into a powerful ruler, and increasingly felt herself to be the divinely-favoured inmate of the lake. She was not one of the rabble! She hunted large and small, and lorded it over the inhabitants of the lake as far as she possibly could.
By more frequent and longer expeditions, she increased her knowledge of the lake, and learned the routes to all the reefs, creeks and banks; and she ascertained that in certain directions her world was immense. It was only the surface that she shunned, and the deepest depths; for there were great crayfish--to whom the Creator had been so good as to set their maxillary half at the end of a pair of long, jointed claws--and there, too, lived Oa, the dreaded fish-monster.
Grim’s territory lay half-way between these.
In the pure light of early dawn, when the night flies and moths, drowsy and intoxicated with their nocturnal visits to the flowers, fell by hundreds into the water on their way home; when the swallows relieved the bats, and the whirligigs in the sheltered nooks began their noiseless scurrying over the water, beneath which the water-plants were beginning to appear in green, yellow and rust-red colours; when the day dawned down where Grim had her home, and the wide surface above her was filled with light and radiance--then she hunted most keenly, and felt most voracious, and then there was terror in her splash and snap.
One morning early, a breeze is ruffling the surface of the lake, and winding, white-foamed currents are eating their way out among black shallows. The terns are diving down after small fish, and along the rush-bordered banks the rising sun is treading the water.
Grim is abroad, pushing herself forward like a shadow along the bottom. Her cunning crocodile eyes are turned up so that they project from her head.