She scratches madly at the sack.... Her twenty crescent-shaped claws stick out through the canvas in white clusters. However much they shake she won’t go to the bottom, but remains obstinately clinging half-way up the side. It dawns suddenly upon her that the humans have deceived her by their unusual kindness; now at last is confirmed what she has so often suspected, that humans, when they try, can be even more cunning than she.
All is pitch-black around her.... Her pupils contract, and her sight, which has always served her so well, now works a veritable miracle: she sees right through the canvas, sees clearly the gleam of water appear beneath her.
When they swing her to and fro, in just the same way as the wind has so often swung her in the treetop, it becomes more difficult to see; everything grows dark again.
Suddenly she is falling ... yes, she feels at once that she is falling! She clings even more frantically to the side of the sack.
But the sack is falling too! She withdraws her claws from the canvas and holds out her paws ready to land, just as she used to do in the old days when she was kicked through the trap-door in the loft. Suddenly she feels something hard and cold touch her.... She is not alone in the sack—she has a comrade!
The comrade is a brick....
The next moment she reaches the water! An ice-cold shower streams in on her, with a smell so horrible that she quite forgets to shiver. She is on the point of suffocation, and leaps up and down the sides of the sack like a fly in a bottle....
The sack is a new one. It has been sacrificed specially for her; they don’t want to see her again! But just as the canvas has hitherto defied her claws, so, to a certain degree, it defies the water; she still finds a little air to breathe, in her mad death-dance in the dark....
All the time she tears at the sack.... She is lucky, and makes an opening in the seam. She struggles through, comes to the surface, sucks in air, sees land, and paddles hurriedly to the bank.
The farm hand who was sent to drown Grey Puss obeyed the order much against his will. He had been a sailor in his younger days, and knew what a lingering torture death by drowning was.