Now the weather is clearing, however, and the lake is calming down--real fishing weather, thinks the angler, and he hums the old angler’s song:
“When the wind is in the east, ’Tis neither good for man nor beast; When the wind is in the south, It blows the bait in the fishes’ mouth.”
The terns, with their long forked tails and black caps rise and fall in the air around him. They are good Samaritans to all the half-dead bait he from time to time throws overboard. The poor little ill-used things hastily make for the shadow of the boat or take up a position beside a floating weed. They want to hide because they feel weak; they do not want to go down into deep water to Oa. Then the terns snap them up, and put them down their little red throats.
Three or four of them are pursuing, with shrieks and snarls, another which is flying away with a little bleak, like a piece of white stick in its jaws. It reminds the fisherman of a heron he once shot at, and which sent out a shower of such half-dead little fish.
At that moment he has a bite at one of his lines. The line runs off the reel at a great pace, and the rod, which rests on the row-lock, but with its thick end wedged under a board at the bottom of the boat, bends like a flag-leaf and dips its point down into the water.
He seizes the rod and lifts it. The line is running out at full speed. He carefully checks it, making the resistance stronger and stronger, so as to prevent the fish from breaking the line with a sudden jerk.
Grim has taken the bait, and is now darting about with it. She had been hungry after three days’ storm and wind, and had therefore rushed blindly at the lure. Alas, it is another of those prickly fish, she notices at once, one of those confounded tit-bits that are only to be looked at, but which neither teeth nor throat are ever glad to deal with; and she opens her mouth and chokes and spits.
She gets rid of the fish she had snatched; she sees it, half dead and with long rents in its sides from her teeth, floating on its side with a reddish yellow eye turned up towards her through the water. But the prickly thorn that she took in at the same time is fixed in her jaw.
She darts hither and thither, turning and twisting. Now she is down in deep water, rubbing her wounded mouth upon the bottom, now she darts, with the bubbles in her wake rising above her, round a clump of water-lilies.
The angler sees an island of leaves as big as a dining-table disappear.