The flabby, wrinkled skin of the throat vibrates with her violent, convulsive gulps, and the lower jaw of more than arm’s length is pushed out beyond the upper, exposing to view the extreme points of a row of long, dagger-like teeth at the shrunken corners of the mouth.
The monster now turns slowly on her axis, her big, expressionless, watery eye, looking, with its dirty grey colour, like an unwashed window in an empty, deserted house, projects, fixed and blind, from her huge head.
The iron has reached her swimming-bladder, and robbed her of the power of navigation. She grows dizzy, and like a great float at the bite of a big fish, she goes down silently and straight.
A man busy ploughing heard the boy’s cry, and running up, learned what was the matter: a monster of an animal, that Rasmus could not pull up, had sailed over half the bog with him!
The man fished up the plank, and helped the boy ashore. Then he fetched his horses, harnessed them to the line, and drew Grim slowly, but surely, up on to the bank.
She lay that night moored to a birch-tree. Life was long since extinct.
A message was telephoned to the innkeeper, who collected items of news for the editor’s paper, “that Peter Jenn’s son had caught, under the strangest circumstances, a specimen of the great sea-serpent. It resembled a prehistoric toad rather than a fish of the present day.”
The following day the whole district gathered at the spot, and the schoolmaster appeared with a man of science who had been summoned.
“Why, it’s a pike,” said the professor, as soon as he saw it, “an unusually large and old specimen, it is true, but still only a pike.” And it must be confessed that he felt a little hurt at having been called out on so long a journey for nothing.