By balancing along a plank he got on to a little solitary island surrounded by duck-weed. The plank swayed very much under him, and the island sank alarmingly beneath his weight; but he could see that it had borne people before, and he was on it now! A bushy grey willow grew in the middle of the island, and a spike of purple loose-strife raised its head above it.
Grim was lying in a flat, muddy bay, hidden in a large clump of mares’-tails. A fat, lazy carp was half swimming, half floating in the open water in front of her. Had she not been in the bog with its scarcity of food, the very sight of such carrion would have made her sick; as it was, she took it with thankfulness, and ran at it with such greed that she gulped it straight down, and got a large steel hook far down in her stomach.
For a moment she felt it was an uncomfortable mouthful; the flabby morsel must have gone down the wrong way. Well, she would disgorge it!
But she could not, and there was a thick stalk like a water-lily stem that kept tickling her throat. She was going to spit the stalk out, when she noticed that it was rooted in a tuft of reeds.
“Rubbish!” thought Grim, as she flourished her fins and twisted her tail; for she meant to get out of this warm corner. She set her teeth and started off. The mares’ tails broke and the rushes curtsied as she crashed along; everything rocked--the bank and the bay, the reeds and the island; it seemed to the boy as if a pig were running round and rooting about under the water.
The enthusiastic fisherman in grey-weather cloth, with sky-blue rod, silk line, and running tackle, had never had the luck to catch this monster; and here was little Rasmus with his bean-pole, his steel hook and his tethering-rope, and his tackle held!
Grim pulled at the line till the rod was half under water. The boy had all but let go, when a sudden violent jerk upset him. He had no time to save himself, and with the rod in his arms he fell into the willow-bush. The rope tightened so that the strands creaked and groaned; but the rod was fast in the bush.
Rasmus thinks of making for the shore by the plank, but sees, to his terror, that the island is afloat. The fish on his hook has pulled it away from its anchorage, and is now dragging him out into the deep water. The water bubbles about the rope and foams out from the island, as if it were the bow of a racing-yacht. Sometimes the little raft heels over horribly, so that Rasmus’s wooden shoes are filled with water. He has quite given himself up for lost, and is repeating the Lord’s Prayer.
In the meantime, Grim is dragging him, like a second Tom Thumb, from one end of the pool to the other. She twists and turns, dives down head first to the bottom, only to shoot straight up a few seconds later to the surface to lash it into foam and waves. Great bubbles and myriads of atoms of horrid, black peat-sediment float like swelling clouds in all directions.