He seizes the rod and lifts it. The line is running out at full speed. He carefully checks it, making the resistance stronger and stronger, so as to prevent the fish from breaking the line with a sudden jerk.
Grim has taken the bait, and is now darting about with it. She had been hungry after three days’ storm and wind, and had therefore rushed blindly at the lure. Alas, it is another of those prickly fish, she notices at once, one of those confounded tit-bits that are only to be looked at, but which neither teeth nor throat are ever glad to deal with; and she opens her mouth and chokes and spits.
She gets rid of the fish she had snatched; she sees it, half dead and with long rents in its sides from her teeth, floating on its side with a reddish yellow eye turned up towards her through the water. But the prickly thorn that she took in at the same time is fixed in her jaw.
She darts hither and thither, turning and twisting. Now she is down in deep water, rubbing her wounded mouth upon the bottom, now she darts, with the bubbles in her wake rising above her, round a clump of water-lilies.
The angler sees an island of leaves as big as a dining-table disappear.
Then she is off again. The reel shrieks and hums as if a giant grasshopper sat chirping in it. All at once, Grim leaps out of the water high into the air, so that her golden, black-streaked body, with the panther-like spots and the trickling water-drops, casts a gleam over the lake.
Never had the good man seen such a fish! The very waves that it raises as it returns to the water, breaking the surface like a submarine, show him that it is--as he is accustomed to express it--“one of the good old-fashioned sort.” He continues to gaze open-mouthed at the place where it disappeared, while a flurry of rings spreads out in all directions.
A little later a whirlpool appears on the seething water, and he catches a glimpse of a dorsal fin with the hinder point missing. Then the old fisherman rejoices. A marked fish, one of his oldest, perhaps his biggest!
He winds in, lets the line run out, and winds in again. His big body is perspiring with his exertions, and he has to stand with his legs wide apart and his feet firmly fixed whenever the mighty fish gives one of its sudden jerks.