Food! Food!
It is true she always felt her stomach rather heavy, for in the course of time she had got it paved with the most remarkable things. Besides various hooks and wire traces, there was a large key that once, in her youth, when she had been standing beneath one of the great water-birds, had come darting like a roach through the water. There was also a dessert-spoon acquired under similar circumstances, a plummet, and, lastly, a watch-chain, from the ill-fated angler’s vest. All these had, however, become encysted, and were not for consumption; at the very most they were an aid to digestion!
She has been a week over her last splendid catch.
She makes another and another; but after a couple of months she has emptied this bog-pool too. What now, and whither?
One evening she works her way in among flowering iris, club-rushes, and marsh-grass, and peers enviously up at the big dragon-flies that are chasing fat flies not an inch above her head. She grows hungrier than ever, and sets to work to devour black horse-leeches in place of eels, and the roots of certain water-plants, which she tries to persuade herself are worms.
In the warm, still, summer evening, the shadows shoot from the banks and ridges, framing the blood-red sunset hues in ebony. Had there been but a few roach left, they would have been playing ducks and drakes over the smooth water.
A reed just beside her moves, and from her hiding-place at the edge of the rushes she sees the reed-warbler flitting about up above. The crafty expression comes into her flat eye; she calculates her distance, and makes a spring.
The first time the bird is too quick for her, but the next time her effort is crowned with success; and the third time she closes her jaws on the reed-warbler’s foster-child, a large, red-eyed young cuckoo!
Grim was an artist in her way, and had her own peculiar tricks. Since the day when she had leapt out of the angler’s boat, she had developed into a regular flying-fish.
Food! Food! The constant refrain both above water and below. To have something in the maw--to have much--as much as possible. Food! Food!