Towards evening the sky becomes overcast and the troubled water looks thick and muddy. Little waves leap up, stand for a moment at their height as if trying to keep their balance, and then give up the attempt and roll down.
A solitary little sunbeam still now and again brightens up all the grey-veiled colours, and then the water takes the hues of a fallow-deer, and the water-lily leaves become floating patches of rainbow.
In the muddy valley between the bottom-springs, Oa is beginning to move. She blinks her cunning eyes, and their blue-black pupils become large and round. Then she sets out on a nocturnal expedition across the lake, steals into the rocky grottos of the cloister-cells, and finds a new hiding-place beneath the wreck of a boat--a new arrival. With her snout just in the rent between the bottom and the gunwale, she lies like a dog in its kennel, until night closes in and all is dark and silent.
Then she lets herself slowly drift along the edge to the reedy borders of the lake, taking every drowned dog or cat as gifts from the Creator’s hand.
Everything that has no longer the power to keep above the water, all that is dead and drifts about, belongs to the crayfish and to her.
The Nipper had already found the body when Oa arrived.
Spring has come, and the pike are about to spawn. Grim, the great she-pike, has been lying motionless for days among the bottom vegetation, waiting the call of the sun. And now it has come. One morning it suddenly bursts through and lights up the forest of stalks in the yellow, weedy margin. In the little open spaces between the tufts there is life and movement, and a sound of splashing everywhere; dark scaly bodies rise slowly out of the water. Then the young fish gambol, their fins beating like wings in the sunshine.
Grim’s cold heart, too, feels the spring, and it warms her icy blood. She swims about, full of gentler feelings, she notes an attraction in the shallow water close inshore, the grass of the ditches, and the sheltered pools of the marsh. And suddenly she recollects her bridal chamber, far up at the end of a broad, sun-warmed ditch fringed with flowering willow and drooping birch, with flickering sunlight and shadow, and the splashing of lively wooers.