In the winter especially things were difficult. In the lake, which had been her home for more than thirty years, it had been easy to manage. It was too big to be frozen over; even in the severest cold the bottom springs kept large areas open. But this was not the case with the marsh, for here the “air,” during a long frost, became very close. The water took up the marsh-gas from the decaying remains of animals and plants on the bottom, and could not give it off and renew itself with oxygen.
Grim had then to go where flags and knotgrass pricked tiny, almost invisible holes in the ice. She found them by the gleams of light, and noticed that she could breathe freely at such places.
With this exception she generally kept at the bottom during the cold season, burying herself in the warm, fallen vegetation. There she lay and slept, her blood circulated more slowly, and for days together she required no nourishment.
But the torpid state was not complete; now and then she had to move, and then she satisfied her hunger with mussels and snails, and would also examine the mud-shafts of the peat-pits.
Here in the muddy labyrinths she came upon tench, olive-green fish, with black back. Their scales were very small, and their whole body covered with a thick layer of slime. They were coarse fish, with thick, leathery fins. Formerly she could never endure them, and had made use of them chiefly as a kind of healing remedy when she lived in the lake. When her mouth was full of pricks and scratches from fish-hooks, she would go into the mud to consult them and to get a healing plaster stuck upon her wounded snout by rubbing it against their slimy sides; but now, when hunger sharpened her appetite, she had to turn her former benefactors to another use, and get as much as possible out of the consultation. She therefore ate them with pleasure.
In the summer she seldom touched them, but fattened herself on everything that came in her way. She would take a snake that swam across, a frog, a mouse; and if a water-rat made its appearance, she shot up under it, and sucked it in at one mouthful.
In this way she got on fairly well for a few years.
One year, however, there was an unusually dry summer, and in order to find sufficient water she had to move from peat-hole to peat-hole, and often had to live for weeks at a time in the pools left in the deeper hollows. Fortunately for her, as the water sank, all the inhabitants of the bog gradually came together in these basins. She came across perch and carp; and eels, leeches and toads were also, like herself, imprisoned here, until the rain should once more bring an abundance of water.
She continued to develop, but otherwise than before; ferocity and cruelty were replaced by cunning and ingenuity. And like all the other pike in the bog, she soon learned to swing herself over the ridges from one hole to another, and even to cross land for short distances.
She had the choice between dying of hunger and finding an expedient.