The Way of the Wild Part 4

Blackie discovered his remaining progeny sitting about in bushes, squawking, a few minutes later, when he returned, somewhat agitated to his precious lawn, and there he promptly proceeded to feed them. The task was such a large one, and took so long, and so many worms had to be cut up, and so much bread, and, I may say, when all else failed, so many daisies had to be picked, before he finally silenced their ceaseless, craving remarks, that, by the time he had finished feeding himself and had a clean up, something of the pain of the tragedy had gone from him.

And fine fat blackbirds he made of those youngsters, too, in the end, I want to tell you, for he stuck to 'em like a brick.

III

UNDER THE YELLOW FLAG

A little past noon each day the sun covered a crack between two boards on the summer-house floor, and up through that aperture, for three days, had come a leggy, racy-looking, wolfish black spider. Each day, as it grew hotter, she extended her sphere of jerky investigation, vanis.h.i.+ng down the crack again when the sun pa.s.sed from it.

To-day she prolonged her roamings right up the wall of the summer-house and along a joist bare of all save dust, and--well, the spider walked straight on, moving with little jerks as if by intermittent clockwork, and she seemed to stroll right on top of the wasp lying curled up on her side. Only when one of the latter's delicate feelers s.h.i.+fted round towards her, as though in some uncanny way conscious of her approach, did she leap back as if she had touched an electric wire. Then she froze--flat. The wasp was lying curled up, as we have said, upon her side, her head tucked in, her wings drawn down, her jaws tight shut upon a splinter of wood. She had been there half-a-year, asleep, hibernating, and in that state, without any other protection than the summer-house roof and walls, had survived the frosts of winter.

The wasp did not move further.

The spider appeared to be taking things in, measuring her chances, weighing the risk against her famished hunger--possibly her late husband had been her last meal, months ago--marking the vital spot upon her prey, aiming for the shot, which must be true, for one does not miss in attacking a wasp--and live. Only, she would not have risked it at all, perhaps, if the wasp had seemed alive, or more alive, at any rate.

Then came the shot--one cannot in justice call it a spring; it was too instant to be termed that. The spider simply was upon the wasp without seeming to go there; but the wasp was not there, or, rather, her vital spot wasn't. She had kicked herself round on her side, like a cart-wheel, lying flat, with her feet, and the spider's jaws struck only hard cuira.s.s. Before the spider, leaping back, wolf-like, could lunge in her lightning second stroke, the wasp was on her feet, a live thing, after all.

The warmth had been already soaking the message of spring into her cold-drugged brain, and now this sudden attack had finished what the warmth had begun. She was awake, on her feet, a live and dangerous proposition; groggy, it is true; dazed, half-working, so to speak; but a force to be reckoned with--after half-a-year. And one saw, too, at a glance that she was different from ordinary wasps--would make two, in fact, of any ordinary wasp; and her great jaws looked as if they could eat one and comfortably deal with more; whilst her dagger-sting, now unsheathed and ready--probably for the first time--could deliver a wound twice as deep and deadly as the ordinary wasp. She was, in short, a queen-wasp; a queen of the future, if Fate willed; a queen as yet without a kingdom, a sovereign uncrowned, but of regal proportions and queenly aspect, for all that; for in the insect world royalties are fas.h.i.+oned upon a super-standard that marks them off from the common herd.

The spider hesitated. She knew the danger of the stripes of yellow--the yellow flag, so to speak. The fear of it is upon every insect that lives. At the same time, the queen was undoubtedly yet numb.

Antagonists decide in the insect world like a flash of light, and quick as thought they act. The spider attacked now so quickly that she seemed to have vanished, and she met--jaws. Back she shot, circled, shot in again, and she met--sting!

It was never clear whether that sting went home. The spider did. She fell--fell plump to the floor, only not breaking what spiders have in place of a neck because of the fact that, being a spider, she never moved anywhere, not even upon a spring, without anchoring a line of web down first. Therefore, an inch from the ground, she fetched up with a jerk upon the line that she had anch.o.r.ed up on the joist, spun round, let herself drop the rest of the way, and ran into the crack between the boards of the floor. Goodness knows if she lived.

The wasp, with that extremely droll, lugubrious look on her long, mask-like face which makes the faces of insects so funny and uncanny, like pantomime masks, sat down as if nothing had happened, apparently to scheme out the best way to possess herself of a kingdom and become a queen in fact as well as in name. Really, she was cleaning herself--combing her antennae with her forelegs, provided with bristle hairs for the purpose, sc.r.a.ping and polis.h.i.+ng her wings, as if they did not already s.h.i.+ne like mother-o'-pearl, and was.h.i.+ng her quaint face.

She was still rather groggy from the effects of her long sleep and the cold endured--it is a wonder how she had stood the latter at all--and when, with a subdued inward sort of hum, she finally launched herself in flight, she nearly fell to the ground before righting herself and flying in a zigzag heavily across the lawn.

A c.o.c.k-chaffinch up in the limes saw her, and condescending at last to break his song, described a flas.h.i.+ng streak of wine-red breast and white wing-bars in the sun. He appeared to recognize her sinister yellow s.h.i.+eld in time, however, and returned to his perch with a flourish, leaving the wasp to go on and begin dancing up the wall of the house till she came to the open window. Here she vanished within.

The sunlight sat on the floor of the room inside, and the baby sat in the sunlight; and the wasp, apparently still half-awake, went, or, rather, nearly tumbled, and sat beside the baby.

They made an odd picture there--the golden sun, the sunny, golden-headed baby, and that silent, yellow she-devil, crawling, crawling, crawling, with her narrow wings gleaming like gems.

Then the child put out her chubby hand to seize that bright-yellow object--how was she to know that it was the yellow signal of danger in the insect world that she saw? And, of course, being a baby, she was going to stuff it into her mouth. But Fate had use for that wasp--perhaps for that baby. Wherefore there was a little scream, a pair of woman's arms swept down and whisked that baby into the air, and a high-heeled shoe whisked the astonished wasp into a corner. Here she swore savagely, vibrating her head with tremendous speed in the process, rose heavily and menacingly, made to fly out, hit the upper window, which was shut, and which she could not see, but felt, and fell to the floor again, where she apparently had brain-fever, buzzing round and round on her back like a top the while.

And then, rising suddenly, the queen flew away, hitting nothing in the process, but getting through the lower and open part of the window.

She seemed anxious to make sure of not getting into the house again.

She flew right away, rising high to top the garden hedge, and dropping low on the far side, to buzz and poke about in and out, up along the hedge-bank that bordered the hayfield.

She flew as one looking for something, and every insect in her way took jolly good care--in the shape of scintillating streaks and dashes--to get out of it. The mere sight of that yellow-banded cuira.s.s s.h.i.+ning in the sun was apparently quite enough for them--most of them, anyway. As a matter of fact, she was looking for a site for a city. She had ambition, and would found her a city, a city of her very own, with generous streets at right angles, on the American plan; and she would be queen of it. It was a big idea, and we should have said an impossible one, seeing that at that moment she was the city and its population and its queen all rolled into one, so to speak.

Queen-wasps, however, also on the American plan, ruled the word "impossible" out of their dictionary long ago. They "attempt the end, and never stand to doubt."

The queen came to rest on a bare patch of ground an front of a hole, and a black and hairy spider, with two hindlegs missing on the offside, spun round in the entrance of that hole to face her. He had not been noticeable until he moved.

She left him in a hurry, and thereafter resumed her endless searching along the hedge-bank. A dozen times she vanished into a hole, and, after a minute or so, came out again with the air of one dissatisfied.

Half-a-dozen times she came out tail first, buzzing warnings and very angry, at the invitation of a b.u.mble-bee queen, a big, hook-jawed, carnivorous beetle in s.h.i.+ning mail, and so forth, but she never lost her head.

Finally, she came to a mole-hole that suited her. The other burrows had all turned out to be field-mouse holes, leading ultimately into a main tunnel that ran the whole length of the hedge apparently, and was a public way for all the little whiskered ones. But this tunnel, bored by the miner mole, ran nowhither, having caved in not far from the entrance, and was very sound of construction, with a nice dry slope.

She selected a wide spot where the tunnel branched, each branch forming a _cul-de-sac_. Here she slew swiftly several suspicious-looking little tawny beetles and one field-cricket, who put up a rare good fight for it, found loafing about the place.

It pleased the queen that here, in this spot, she would found her a city. But first she must, as it were, take the lat.i.tude and the longitude of this her stronghold to be. She must know where her city was, must make absolutely dead sure, certain, of finding it again when she went out. Otherwise, if she lost it--well, there would be an end to it before it had begun, so to speak. For this purpose, therefore, she rose slowly, humming to herself some royal incantation--rose, upon a gradually widening corkscrew spiral, into the air.

She was, in point of fact, surveying the district round her capital to be, marking each point--bush, stone, gra.s.s-tuft, tree-trunk, flower-cl.u.s.ter, clod, branch, anything and everything, great and small--and jotting down in indelible memory fluid, upon whatever she kept for a brain, just precisely the position of every landmark. And as she rose her circles ever widened, so that at last her big compound eyes took in quite a big stretch of sunlit picture, to be photographed upon her memory, and there remain forevermore.

It took her some time, for it was some job; but once done, it was done for good.

Next, alighting with great hustle--now that the work was once begun--the queen ran into her tunnel, and made sure that n.o.body had "jumped her claim" in the interval. She found an ant, red and ravenous, taking too professional an interest in the place, and she abolished that ant with one nip; though, as you may be sure, the tiny insect fought like a bulldog.

Then she executed a shallow excavation upon the site of the future city itself, carrying each pellet of earth outside beyond the entrance.

This also took time, though she worked at fever-pitch, almost with fury; but she managed to finish it, and fly away into the landscape in a remarkably short while, considering.

Here once again she appeared to be searching for something through the yellow suns.h.i.+ne and the falling blossom-petals--confetti from Spring's wedding. And presently she found it, or seemed to--an old gate, off its hinges. But the wood was rotting, and she was no fool. She knew her job--the job she had never done before, by the way--and after humming around it in a fretful, undecided sort of fas.h.i.+on for some while, she flew on. Apparently she was looking for wood, but not _any_ wood. Cut wood appeared to be her desire, and that oak; at least, she put behind her a deal board lying half-overgrown, after one careful professional inspection.

Her way was through a perilous world, beset by a thousand foes, mostly in the nature of traps and lines and barbed-wire entanglements set by spiders. As a rule you didn't see these last at all--nor did she; but her yellow-and-black badge usually won her a way of respect--and hate--and she cut or struggled herself clear of such web-lines as her feelers failed to spot in time.

At last she found some real oak rails, and set to work upon them at once, planing with her sharp shear-jaws. A tiger-beetle, gaudy and hungry-eyed, sought to pounce upon her in this task. He was long-legged, and keen, and lean, and very swift; but she shot aloft just in time; and when she came down again, with a z-zzzzp, as quickly as she went up, sting first, he had wisely dodged into a cranny, where he defied her with open and jagged jaws.

Again getting to work, she planed off a pellet of good sound wood--it looked like a nail-sc.r.a.pe, the mark she made--and masticating it and moistening it with saliva, whirred back like a homing aeroplane to her city in the making.

There was a whir and a buzz as she pa.s.sed through the portals of her main gate from the light of day, and she reappeared again, backing out, "looking daggers," as we say, and brandis.h.i.+ng her poisoned dart--her sting, if you insist, on the end of her tail--in the air. But she still hung on to her pellet.

Presumably some unlucky visitor had called in her absence. More sounds of concentrated argument followed, and finally there fell out, rather than rushed out, a small and amazingly slender black wasp, one of those hermits who seem to consecrate their lives to lonely working for a family they never see. This unhappy one slid down the bank, curled up at the bottom, uncurled, curled up again, and--remained curled.

Apparently _her_ day's work was done, which comes of falling foul of the yellow flag.

Arrived inside, at her hallowed chamber, our queen carefully selected a rootlet in the roof--not just any old rootlet, mark you; never any "old" anything, you will notice, but a good, sound, well-found rootlet that you could hang five or six pounds' weight to; indeed, three rootlets before she had finished. To these rootlets she fastened--gummed would be a more correct word--her pellet of wasp-paper, in the form of a thin layer, and hurried away, singing, for more. This was, so to speak, the foundation-stone of the city, laid, be it noticed, not haphazard--our queen never did any business that way--but with mathematical regard as to what was to follow. In very fact, too, it was the foundation-stone of her city, only upside-down, though that is nothing. Wasps always do things that way, which is unlike ants, those other and greater city builders.

Back came the queen very soon with another load, and pasted that--thin--to the first layer, hurrying, bustling, humming a happy song continuously to herself. Then away again for more, and in the process to a lively battle with a robber-fly, who appeared set upon robbing her of her blood. It tried, like the beetle, to stalk her and pounce upon her back, what time she was planing out wood for paper-pulp; but her back wasn't there when it pounced, and her jaws were. It "waited on," hovering like a falcon, and twice as keen, and when she got to work again, dropped like a hurled lance-head, only to be met with jaws, wide and ready, as before.

It went away, watching from afar--far for an insect--from "the little speedwell's darling blue" upon the hedge-bank, and just as she was moistening the load, gathered ready to fly off, delivered its final ultimatum--a marvelously persistent murderer. This time it, or, rather, she, was received with the point--the poisoned point--and, turning like a spent lightning-flash to avoid it, found the queen hard on her heels, following all down the gay hedge-ditch, humming high, in nearly a shriek of rage. Finally, she turned, to do battle for her life, and the two, grappling, fell as shooting-stars fall, gleaming, athwart the sun, with a brrr-r like a fused wire, and finished the job, rolling over and over on the ground--rolling over and over among the stalks of bluebells, like the heavens "upraising from the earth."

It is written, however, that few in the insect world can withstand a queen of the yellow devils, and in a few seconds the wasp got up and flew home again, quite unperturbed. The robber-fly did not get up, and she was not quite unperturbed, but died as they die who are poisoned with formic acid, and very soon was still.

By the time the shadows crept across the entrance to the derelict mole-hole, warning the wasp back--for your true wasp is a wors.h.i.+per of the sun--the queen had formed a disc of paper, and suspended there-from, in the middle, a stalk, also of paper, which widened out at its base, and became, as it were, the outlines of four six-sided cells.

The cells were in the shape of a cross--that cross which you will always find at the foundation of the cities of the waspfolk, and, in a way, a sign or mark of their nationality--the cross in the market-square, so to speak, outwards from which the city grew.

The queen, satisfied apparently with her new city so far, hung up and went to sleep. When anything or anybody came to prospect for house lots, or edible victims, during the still, silent, silver night, she hummed very severely, like an electric fan, to let the intruders know who she was, and they mostly backed out again in a hurry. If they took a step nearer the hum rose an octave, and became very wicked, and that, so far as most of them were concerned, finished it.

Two, however, there were who would not take even that hint. One was a shrew-mouse, thirsting for blood, but who got poison instead, and next morning was found running about with his mouth somewhere concealed behind his ear, if one may be pardoned the expression, in consequence; and the other was a carnivorous beetle, in black, purple-shot armor, and armed with jaws toothed like lobsters' claws. The queen took some nasty scars from those same jaws before she got home with the poisoned point, a clean thrust 'twist breastplate and armlet, and the invader doubled up on the spot where he was, and had to be dragged out in the morning--not the dawning, for the sun had well stoked up before our wasp would have anything to do with him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "A shrew-mouse, thirsting for blood, but who got poison instead"]

She found the day already in full swing when she rose, buzzing, from her front-gate, late--for wasps hate early morning chill, like Red Indians--and, circling once, swung straight away. She jumped into full hustle right off, you see. She did not merely work; she superworked.

Forced to short hours by her const.i.tution, she had to make up for it in the time she got, and she did. She allowed nothing to stop her. If anything tried to, she mostly stopped it, for there was no compromise about this nation-builder; she reached her goal every time.