The greater the opponent, the greater is her reward and satisfaction. Her stomach desires what tongue and teeth already feel so near; she must succeed in getting this huge morsel--as she once did with her little brother--to lie unresistingly in her mouth, so that she can have the pleasure of turning it about and begin to swallow it.
Terror twists and turns in her efforts to get a bite; but Grim has been fortunate in taking hold so far forward that there is no room left for her to bite. Terror has only her tail-end to strike with, and with it she sweeps up clouds of mud sufficient to hide an elephant.
The battle lasts for more than three hours, and all the ice in the pool is broken into fragments. By this time Grim’s miry opponent is exhausted: success has crowned the efforts of the old fratricide, as it has always done in this kind of contest, ever since she was the length of a darning-needle. Then in a trice she turns the harassed victim over, and suffocates her by wedging her head into her own throat. But it takes her four days to get Terror through the mouth of her draw-bag. At last she had a fish again that went some way!
[XII: GRIM DEVELOPS]
Grim was now about five feet long, and weighed something like fifty pounds. As with all pike that live in small lakes, her head had grown inordinately. Her daily fight for food necessitated constant use of her head-muscles, which had developed accordingly. In her mouth alone a wooden shoe could easily have been hidden.
The old bright colours along her back and belly were now quite altered. The body vied in blackness with the evil-smelling mud of the bog, and broad, golden-bronze streaks shaded the dull sides. Out in the sunshine she had quite a rusty, coppery appearance.
She was a mythical pike, one of those old-time fish about which the late lamented angler had told wonderful tales in his day. Even the regular mane of scales of a finger’s length, from the back of the neck down over the pectoral fins, was not wanting.
But her eye was evil, a mixture of yellow and green, cold and deceitful as the foam of the bog-waves; it always shone with a fierce hunger, and even on the rare occasions when the hunger was appeased, the expression of that eye was one of insatiable voracity.
She has succeeded in clearing the bog-holes nearest to her own quarters of every frog, water-rat, and wild duckling; and she has eaten up all the swallows that have come to drink as they flew. Again she has had to travel a good way overland, until at last she has come to rest in a wild, wide pool, which she has never before visited.
Here she has had a fresh, welcome success. She has overcome and swallowed another big, muddy specimen of a bog-pike, even heavier than Terror; the fellow had just bolted a smaller one of his own species, and in it lay a full-grown mallard.