Half-decayed remains of dead stalks form a network all over the great cushion at the bottom, and fresh remains of cell-tissue and organic things just dead are always on their way down. But from the depth new life rises once more; the sun is ever setting free tiny, green, mossy balls of slime that lie moored, as it were, to a single fine umbilical cord, and twirl and sway down on the bottom. All at once the cord breaks, and they rise through the water in a cluster like bubbles, and expand into large, fringed umbels.
The willow-wands on the knolls are in flower, and behind the points of land the coots are quarrelling, while the snipe fly round and round in the air, and let the wind play upon their feather-harps.
Then comes the day when she is ready to spawn. A peculiar, and to her inexplicable, desire to bury herself in the rushes and reed-stubble fills her, and she likes to run her big body far up among the grass and sedges, where she can scarcely swim or turn. With joy she feels the thrill right up her flanks.
She has never been very sensitive, least of all when it did not concern herself; and now she looks unmoved upon the excited males as they snap and butt at one another. Unfortunately she has no appetite, or she would have eaten the most tempting of them.
The spawning soon begins, and the fish leap one about another in a cluster; Grim loses all consciousness of her surroundings, while she sheds her golden stream of five hundred thousand clear, yellow eggs.
No sooner, however, is this accomplished than she comes to her senses, and suddenly feels an overpowering hunger after her tender abandonment. Her gently waving tail-fin turns stiff as a wind-filled sail, and with a quick, powerful turn she slips her spiked jaws over the nearest beau, and slowly transfers him to the vacant place within.
Over an hour the wedding-breakfast lasts, and then the great lady swims off complacently with a flap of her late lamented bridegroom’s tail still sticking out of her mouth.
Later on, on her way back through the road of rushes down to the lake, her blood is cold and her will dormant.
The spring was unusually dry; the water from the thaw had sunk in at once, and the brook received little additional water; and when Grim reached the old, half-rotten dam, she found it had been replaced by a new one.
Here she remained together with a number of other fish that gradually collected at the dam, and tried to get through. For two days she was unable to get either forwards or backwards; several times she attempted a leap, but, without success. Then she changed her mind, and went back to the marsh while there was still time.