Insect Stories Part 2

For a curious drowsiness was coming over him. Perhaps, disquieting thought, it was the approaching stupor of the poison's working. His strong long legs became limp, they would not work regularly, they could not hold his heavy hairy body up from the ground. He would get into his hole and rest. But it was too late. And after a few uneven steps, victor Eurypelma settled heavily down beside his amazon victim, inert and forevermore beyond fighting. He was paralyzed.

And so Mary and I brought him home in our collecting box, together with the torn body of Pepsis with her wings of slow fire dulled by the dust of her last struggles. And though it is a whole month now since Eurypelma received his stab from the poisoned javelin of Pepsis, he has not recovered; nor will he ever. When you touch him, he draws up slowly one leg after another, or moves a palpus feebly. But it is living death; a hopeless paralytic is the king.

Dear reader, you are of course as bright as Mary, and so you have noticed, as she did right away, the close parallel between what happened to Eurypelma and what happened to the measuring-worms brought by Ammophila to her nest burrow as described in the first story in this book. And so, like Mary, you realize that the vendetta or life feud between the tarantula family and the family of Pepsis, the tarantula hawk, is based on reasons of domestic economy rather than on those of sentiment, which determine vendettas in Corsica and feuds in Kentucky.

To be quite plain, Pepsis fights Eurypelma to get his huge, juicy body for food for her young; and Eurypelma fights Pepsis to keep from becoming paralyzed provender. If Pepsis had escaped unhurt in the combat at which Mary and I "a.s.sisted," as the French say, as enthralled spectators, we should have seen her drag by mighty effort the limp, paralyzed, spider giant to her nest hole not far distant--a great hole twelve inches deep and with a side chamber at the bottom.

There she would have thrust him down the throat of the burrow, and then crawled in and laid an egg on the helpless beast, from which in time would have hatched the carnivorous wasp grub. Pepsis has many close allies among the wasps, all black or steely blue with smoky or dull-bronze wings, and they all use spiders, stung and paralyzed, to store their nest holes with.

"Do the little black and blue wasps hunt the little spiders and the larger ones the big spiders?" asks Mary.

"Exactly," I respond, "and the giant wasp of them all, Pepsis, the queen of the wasp amazons, hunts only the biggest spider of them all, Eurypelma, the tarantula king, and we have seen her do it."

"Well," says Mary, "even if she wants him for her children to eat, it's a real vendetta, isn't it?"

"Indeed it is," I answer, "it's more real, and fiercer, and more relentless, and more persistent than any human vendetta that ever was.

For every Pepsis mother in the world is always hunting for Eurypelmas to fight. And not _all_ Corsicans have a vendetta on hand, nor all Kentuckians a feud."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TRUE STORY OF THE PIT OF MORROWBIE JUKES]

THE TRUE STORY OF THE PIT OF MORROWBIE JUKES

"It seemed that some one was calling to me in a whisper--'Sahib!

Sahib! Sahib!' exactly as my bearer used to call me in the mornings. I fancied that I was delirious until a handful of sand fell at my feet. Then I looked up and saw a head peering down into the amphitheater--the head of Dunnoo, my dog-boy, who attended to my collies. As soon as he had attracted my attention, he held up his hand and showed a rope. I motioned, staggering to and fro the while, that he should throw it down. It was a couple of leather punkah-ropes knotted together, with a loop at one end. I slipped the loop over my head and under my arms; heard Dunnoo urge something forward; was conscious that I was being dragged, face downward, up the steep sand-slope, and the next instant found myself choked and half-fainting on the sand-hills overlooking the crater."

And then Mary broke in. We were lying in a sunny warm spot on an open hillside a little way off the road, and I was reading aloud from a favorite author.

"That is a fairy story," said Mary, "and I thought we were not going to read any more fairy stories now that I am grown up."

Mary's idea of being grown up is to be more than three feet eleven inches high and to have her hair no longer in two braids.

"Not exactly a fairy story," I replied. "For Kipling rather prefers soldiers to fairies and machines to caps of invisibility. Of course, though, he wrote the Mowgli stories."

"But those are not fairy stories," interrupted Mary. "Those were about a real boy and real animals only a long way off and different from ours."

"Ah-um, real? Well, perhaps; anyway, the Mowgli animals seem more real than most real animals. But this story of the sand-pit and the man sliding down into it and not being able to get out isn't impossible at all. Only the other people down in the bottom seem a little unusual."

"No, there can't be any such place," said Mary positively, "and as there can't be any such place, n.o.body could have slid into it or been in the bottom, and so it is a fairy story. Any story that isn't so is a fairy story."

"Well, that makes it easy to tell a fairy story from the other kinds, and I never knew exactly how before. But I once saw a place much like the sand-pit that Morrowbie Jukes slid into, or that Kipling says he slid into. It is on the side of a great mountain in Oregon; Mt. Hood its name is. I had climbed far above timber line, that is, above where all the trees and bushes stop because it is too cold for them to live, and there is only bare rocks and snow and ice, and had sat down to rest near a great s...o...b..nk a mile long. As I looked back down the mountain I saw a curious yellowish smoke rising in little puffs and curls. I decided to find out about this smoke on my way down; perhaps it was the beginning of a forest fire, and ought to be put out.

"Well, when I got to it there was no fire; the puffs and curls were not smoke. It was a real Morrowbie Jukes pit; a great crater-like hole in the mountain, with its side so steep that the loose volcanic sand and rocks (for the whole mountain is an old volcano) kept slipping down in little avalanches from which puffs and curls of fine yellow dust kept rising and drifting lazily away. If I had made the mistake of going too close to the edge, I should certainly have started one of these avalanches and gone slipping and sliding, faster and faster, to the very bottom, a thousand feet below."

"My!" said Mary; "and were there horrible people in the bottom, and crows?"

"Well, really, Mary, I couldn't see on account of the dust-smoke."

"Of course there weren't, probably," said Mary thoughtfully and a little wistfully.

"Probably not," I had to reply regretfully.

But a bright thought came to me. I remembered something. Several days before I had tramped along this hillside road near which Mary and I were lying and I had seen--well, just wait. So I said to Mary: "But I know where there is a Morrowbie Jukes pit, several of them, indeed, near here. Sha'n't we go and see them?"

"Why, of course," said Mary rather severely.

"Let us go galloping as Morrowbie Jukes did," said I. So we took hold of hands and as soon as we got out of the chaparral, we went galloping, hop, hop, hoppity, hop, down the road. I must confess that I got out of breath pretty soon and my knees seemed to creak a little.

And when a swift motor-car came exploding by, going up the hill, all the people stared and smiled to see an elderly gentleman with spectacles and a long coat hop-hopping along with a yellow-haired red-cheeked little girl in knee skirts. But we don't mind people much!

They simply don't know all the things that go with being happy.

Pretty soon--and it was high time, for I had only three breaths left--we came to a place where the road bent sharply around the hillside and was especially broad.

"Now, Mary," I said, "be careful and don't fall in. I'm afraid I could not get you out."

"Fall in where? Get me out of what?" asked Mary, quite puzzled. She was staring about excitedly, looking most of the time down into the canon with its spiry redwood trees pus.h.i.+ng far up from the bottom. And then suddenly she saw. She flopped down on her hands and knees in the warm sand by the roadside and cried out, "What funny little holes!"

"Why, Mary," I said with pained surprise. "You don't really mean to call these awful Morrowbie Jukes pits 'funny little holes'! That isn't fair after all we've done to find them. Especially after my galloping all the way right to the very edge of this largest one."

As I spoke I pointed it out with the toe of my shoe, but inadvertently filled it all up by poking a couple of tablespoonfuls of sand and dust into it. But size is quite a relative matter, and for the tiny creatures with whom Mary and I have to deal, the little crater-like holes in the sand of the roadside are large and dangerous pits. We sprawled down on our stomachs among the pits to see what we could see.

Mary saw first. Ah, those bright eyes! My spectacles are rather in the way out-of-doors, I find. But if I keep on getting younger--and I certainly am younger since I got acquainted with Mary--I shall be able soon to leave them at home in my study when I go out to see things.

Mary, then, saw first. What she saw were two very small s.h.i.+ning, brown, gently curved, sharp-pointed, sickle-like jaws sticking up out of the loose sand in the very bottom of one of the pits. They moved once, these curved and pointed jaws, and that movement caught Mary's eye.

"It's the dragon of the pit," I cried. "Dig him out!"

So Mary dug him out. He was very spry and had a strong tendency to shuffle backwards down into the hiding sand. But it takes a keen dragon to get away from Mary, and this one wasn't and didn't.

He was an ugly little brute, squat and hump-backed, with sand sticking to his thinly haired body. But he was fierce-looking for all his diminutiveness. Remember again that whether a thing is big or little to you depends on whether you are big or little. This dragon of the sand-pit was little to us. He is terribly big to the ants.

When Mary got him out and had put him down on the sand near the pit, he trotted about very actively but always backwards. He seems to have got so used to pulling backwards against the frantic struggles of his prey to get up and out of the pit, that he can now only move that way.

After we watched him a while, we "collected" him; that is, put him into a bottle, with some sand, to take home and see if we could keep him in our room of live things. Then we turned our attention to another crater. It was about three inches across at the top and about two inches deep; a symmetrical little broad-mouthed funnel with the loose sand-slopes just as steep as they could be. The slightest disturbance, a touch with a pencil-point for example, would start little sand avalanches down the slopes anywhere. It is, of course, easy to see how this horrible pit-trap works. And, in fact, in the very next moment we saw actually how it did work.

A foraging brown ant that was running swiftly over the ground plunged squarely over the verge of the crater before she could stop. She certainly tried hard to stop when once over, but it was too late.

Slipping and sliding with the rolling sand-grains, down she went right toward those waiting scimitar-like jaws.

Now, these jaws deserve a word of description. Because, horrible as they may seem to the unfortunate ants, they are so well arranged for their particular purpose that they must attract our admiration. The dragon of the pit, ant-lion he is usually called, has no open, yawning mouth behind those projecting jaws, as might be expected. Indeed there is no mouth at all, just a throat, thirsty for ant blood! The slender scimitar jaws have each a groove on the concave inner side, and down this groove runs the blood of the struggling victim, held impaled on the sharp points of the curving mandibles. The two fine grooves lead directly into the throat, and thus there is no need of open mouth with lips and tongue, such as other insects have.

"But see," cried Mary, "the ant has stopped sliding. It is going to get out!"

Ah, Mary, you are not making allowance for all the resources of this dreadful dragon of the pit. Not only is the pit a nearly perfect trap, and the eager jaws at the bottom more deadly than any array of spikes or spears at the bottom of an elephant pit, but there is another most effective thing about this fatal dragon's trap, and that is this: it is not merely a pa.s.sive trap, but an active one. Already it is in action. And Mary sees now how hopeless it is with the ant. For a shower of sand is being thrown up from the bottom of the pit against the ant and it is again sliding down. The dragon has a flat, broad head and powerful neck muscles, and has wit enough to shovel up and hurl ma.s.ses of dry sand-grains against the victim on the loose slopes.

And this starts the avalanche again, and so down slides the frantic ant.

What follows is too painful for Mary and me to watch and certainly too cruel to describe. But one must live, and why not ant-lions as well as ants? If truth must be told, many ants have as cruel habits and as bloodthirsty tastes as the ant-dragon. Indeed, more cruel and revolting habits. For ants have a gastronomic fondness for the babies of other ants, which is a fondness quite different from that which they ought to have. It means that they like these babies--to eat. Some communities of ants, indeed, spend most of their time fighting other communities just to rob them of their babies, which they carry off to their own nests and use in horrible cannibalistic feasts.

Mary and I had seen enough of the Morrowbie Jukes pits. So we went back to our little open sunny spot in the chaparral on the hillside and lay quiet and silent for a long time. Then Mary murmured, "I wonder how the ant-lion digs its pit."