Now and then, while we rested, we watched the laborious ant at his work.
I found nothing new in him—certainly nothing to change my opinion of
him. It seems to me that in the matter of intellect the ant must be a
strangely overrated bird. During many summers, now, I have watched him,
when I ought to have been in better business, and I have not yet come
across a living ant that seemed to have any more sense than a dead one.
I refer to the ordinary ant, of course; I have had no experience of
those wonderful Swiss and African ones which vote, keep drilled armies,
hold slaves, and dispute about religion. Those particular ants may be
all that the naturalist paints them, but I am persuaded that the average
ant is a sham. I admit his industry, of course; he is the hardest
working creature in the world—when anybody is looking—but his
leather-headedness is the point I make against him. He goes out
foraging, he makes a capture, and then what does he do? Go home? No—he
goes anywhere but home. He doesn’t know where home is. His home may be
only three feet away,—no matter, he can’t find it. He makes his capture,
as I have said; it is generally something which can be of no sort of use
to himself or anybody else; it is usually seven times bigger than it
ought to be; he lifts it bodily up in the air by main force and starts;
not toward home, but in the opposite direction; not calmly and wisely,
but with a frantic haste which is wasteful of his strength; he fetches
up against a pebble, and instead of going around it, he climbs over it
backwards dragging his booty after him, tumbles down on the other side,
jumps up in a passion, kicks the dust off his clothes, moistens his
hands, grabs his property viciously, yanks it this way, then that,
shoves it ahead of him a moment, turns tail and lugs it after him
another moment, gets madder and madder, then presently hoists it into
the air and goes tearing away in an entirely new direction; comes to a
weed; it never occurs to him to go around it; no, he must climb it; and
he does climb it, dragging his worthless property to the top—which is as
bright a thing to do as it would be for me to carry a sack of flour from
Heidelberg to Paris by way of Strasburg steeple; when he gets up there
he finds that that is not the place; takes a cursory glance at the
scenery and either climbs down again or tumbles down, and starts off
once more—as usual in a new direction. At the end of half an hour, he
fetches up within six inches of the place he started from and lays his
burden down; meantime he has been over all the ground for two yards
around, and climbed all the weeds and pebbles he came across. Now he
wipes the sweat from his brow, strokes his limbs, and then marches
aimlessly off, in as violent a hurry as ever. He traverses a good deal
of zig-zag country, and by and by stumbles on his same booty again. He
does not remember ever having seen it before; he looks around to see
which is not the way home, grabs his bundle and starts; he goes through
the same adventures he had before; finally stops to rest, and a friend
comes along. Evidently the friend remarks that a last year’s grasshopper
leg is a very noble acquisition, and inquires where he got it. Evidently
the proprietor does not remember exactly where he did get it, but thinks
he got it “around here somewhere.” Evidently the friend contracts to
help him freight it home. Then, with a judgment peculiarly antic (pun
not intentional), they take hold of opposite ends of that grasshopper
leg and begin to tug with all their might in opposite directions.
Presently they take a rest and confer together. They decide that
something is wrong, they can’t make out what. Then they go at it again,
just as before. Same result. Mutual recriminations follow. Evidently
each accuses the other of being an obstructionist. They warm up, and the
dispute ends in a fight. They lock themselves together and chew each
other’s jaws for a while; then they roll and tumble on the ground till
one loses a horn or a leg and has to haul off for repairs. They make up
and go to work again in the same old insane way, but the crippled ant is
at a disadvantage; tug as he may, the other one drags off the booty and
him at the end of it. Instead of giving up, he hangs on, and gets his
shins bruised against every obstruction that comes in the way. By and
by, when that grasshopper leg has been dragged all over the same old
ground once more, it is finally dumped at about the spot where it
originally lay, the two perspiring ants inspect it thoughtfully and
decide that dried grasshopper legs are a poor sort of property after
all, and then each starts off in a different direction to see if he
can’t find an old nail or something else that is heavy enough to afford
entertainment and at the same time valueless enough to make an ant want
to own it.