The Iron Woman by Ted Hughes

1
    School was over and the Easter holidays had begun. Lucy was walking home, between the reed banks, along the marsh road, when it started to happen. She had just come to the small bridge, where the road goes over the deep drain. She called this Otterfeast Bridge, because once she had seen an otter on the edge of it, over the black water, eating an eel. That had been three years before. But she still felt excitement whenever she came to this part of the road, and she always looked ahead eagerly, towards the bridge.
    Today, as usual, the bridge was empty. As she crossed over it, she looked between the rails, into the black water. She always did this, just in case there might be an otter down there, in the water, looking up at her, or maybe swimming beneath at that very moment.
    And today, there was something. But what was it, down there in the water? She leaned over the rail and peered.
    Something deep in the dark water, something white, kept twisting. A fish?
    Suddenly she knew. It was an eel – behaving in the strangest way. At first, she thought it must be two eels, fighting. But no, it was just one eel. It knotted itself and unknotted. Then it swam quickly round in circles, corkscrewing over and over as it went. At one point, its tail flipped right out of the water. Then it was writhing down into the mud, setting a grey cloud drifting. Then it was up at the surface again, bobbing its head into the air. She saw its beaky face, then its little mouth opening. She saw the pale inside of its mouth.
    Then it was writhing and tumbling in a knot. Quite a small eel, only a foot long.
    As it danced its squirming, circling, darting dance, it was drifting along in the current of the drain. Soon she lost sight of it under the water shine. Then, twenty yards downstream, she saw its head bob up again. Then a swirl and it vanished. Then up again, bob, bob, bob.
    What was wrong with it? Seeing its peculiar head bobbing up like that, and its little mouth opening, she had felt a painful twist somewhere in her middle. She had wanted to scoop the eel up and help it. It needed help. Something was wrong with it.

    At that moment, staring along the dimpled shine of the drain where it curved away among the tall reeds, she felt something else.
    At first, she had no idea what made her head go dizzy and her feet stagger. She gripped the bridge rail and braced her feet apart. She thought she had felt the rail itself give her hand a jolt.
    What was it?
    ‘Garronk! Garronk! Garraaaaaark!’
    The floppy, untidy shape of a heron was scramblingstraight up out of the reed beds. It did not flap away in stately slow motion, like an ordinary heron. It flailed and hoisted itself up, exactly as if it were bounding up an invisible spiral stair. Then, from a great height, it tumbled away towards the sea beyond the marsh. Something had scared it badly. But what? Something in the marsh had frightened it. And seeing the heron so frightened frightened Lucy.
    The marsh was always a lonely place. Now she felt the loneliness. As she stood there, looking up, the whole bluish and pinky sky of soft cloud moved slowly. She looked again along the drain, where the reeds leaned all one way, bowing gently in the light wind. The eel was no longer to be seen. Was it still writhing and bobbing its head up, as the slow flow carried it away through the marsh? She looked down into the drain, under the bridge. The black water moved silently, crumpling and twirling little whorls of light.
    Then it came again. Beneath her feet the bridge road jumped and the rail jarred her hand. At the same moment, the water surface of the drain was blurred by a sudden mesh of tiny ripples all over it.
    An earthquake! It must be an earthquake.
    A completely new kind of fear gripped Lucy. For a few seconds she did not dare to move. The thought of the bridge collapsing and dropping her into the drain with its writhing eels was bad enough. But the thoughtof the marsh itself opening a great crack, and