As soon as Ursula got in there she started eating some of those little catfish. Must have been hungry from her trip. Needed a few snacks. She was kind of like a killer whale, bringing part of her head out of the water to scoop them up in mouthfuls in the shallow end where hundreds of them had gathered to hover in dumb anticipation of nothing.
She scooped them and bit them and swallowed them and chomped them, chasing and catching them, working her way around the edge of the bank, muddying the water, picking up two and three here, one or two there. Most fled. Her stomach fluids would dissolve fins and little bony heads. Mere tidbits of fish. She kept chasing them and eating them until she was full, which only took about five minutes, and then she swam to the deeper end, where the water was colder, and slowly slanted off into the borrow pit and then found its smooth clay bottom with her belly, and there she settled, mouth opening and closing, her gills smoothly working, the water washing out of them on each side, red-laced cartilage as delicately scalloped as snowflakes. The rubber-hose handles on her side fins were gone. Her whiskers were waving gently in the water.
And there she lay, waiting, seeing the small fish dart by, no end of food in sight. But she wouldn’t come up again until she was ready to feed again. In the daytime, the bottom was where she’d stay most of the time. Unless she found something interesting to eat. Catfish were like that.