Now and then the boy catches sight of a wrinkled, moss-grown back about as long as a bull’s. It looks to him like one of the ancient oaks of the bog coming up to lie and float on the surface.
Gradually, as the large, pointed steel hook enters farther and farther into Grim’s intestines, and makes her cold, red blood flow the wrong way, her movements become less and less rapid.
The water makes things dim; she no longer sees clearly, and runs full tilt into banks and clumps of reeds. She feels delightfully surfeited, and darts about the pool with the sensation of dragging with her the greatest booty she had ever taken in her life. How it seems to fill her stomach! At last, at last she is satiated, so that her throat seems ready to burst and her jaws to part asunder; and all at once she notices the same strange over-burdened feeling that she had had that day many years ago, when in greed she had swallowed the big perch.
Wildly and recklessly she drags on the rope, careering around with her little captor; but every time she jerks him off an island, or through thickly-matted vegetation, she drives the point of the iron nearer to her heart. At last, in the fever of death, she rushes right in to the bank, and runs the boy aground on an island of reeds.
She lies floating just below the surface, and Rasmus, who now and then between the water-plants catches sight of her greenish-yellow belly and black-spotted tail-fin, cries out in terror.
The old pike of many adventures is wandering in her mind. Is it the big, black perch that she has at last succeeded in consuming? Is it the bull with horns? Or is it one of the big swimming-bird’s young?
Yes, that is it! This time she has succeeded in getting hold of its long leg, and has at last swallowed it and has it safely in her stomach.
But it weighs her down, so that she can no longer keep in a horizontal position. Yes, she feels that distinctly; it is so tremendously satisfying that her tail is sinking and her head rising, and now all at once she rises slowly and stiffly from the water.
The boy almost goes crazy at the sight, and involuntarily covers his eyes with his hands, so fantastically horrible does it appear. Out of the black, muddy water and the purple, poisonous-green plants from which the gases of decomposition release great, bladdery bubbles, stands out Grim’s huge, crocodile head, cold and staring.