Struggling madly in the gummy coils of an immense web, which ever bound
him more tightly, with a wounded creature shuddering in agony not a yard
from him--yet a wounded creature that still strove to reach him with its
poison fangs--Burl had reached the limit of panic.
He fought like a madman to break the coils about him. His arms and
breast were greasy from the oily fish, and the sticky web did not adhere
to them, but his legs and body were inextricably fastened by the elastic
threads spread for just such prey as he.
He paused a moment, in exhaustion. Then he saw, five yards away, the
silvery and black monster waiting patiently for him to weary himself. It
judged the moment propitious. The tarantula and the man were one in its
eyes, one struggling thing that had fallen opportunely into its snare.
They were moving but feebly now. The spider advanced delicately,
swinging its huge bulk nimbly along the web, paying out a cable after it
came inexorably toward him.
Burl's arms were free, because of the greasy coating they had received.
He waved them wildly, shrieking at the pitiless monster that approached.
The spider paused. Those moving arms suggested mandibles that might
wound or slap.
Spiders take few hazards. This spider was no exception to the rule. It
drew cautiously near, then stopped. Its spinnerets became busy, and with
one of its six legs, used like an arm, it flung a sheet of gummy silk
impartially over both the tarantula and the man.
Burl fought against the descending shroud. He strove to thrust it away,
but in vain. In a matter of minutes he was completely covered in a
silken cloth that hid even the light from his eyes. He and his enemy,
the giant tarantula, were beneath the same covering, though the
tarantula moved but weakly.
The shower ceased. The web-spider had decided that they were helpless.
Then Burl felt the cables of the web give slightly, as the spider
approached to sting and suck the sweet juices from its prey.
* * * * *
The web yielded gently as the added weight of the black-bellied spider
approached. Burl froze into stillness under his enveloping covering.
Beneath the same silken shroud the tarantula writhed in agony upon the
point of Burl's spear. It clashed its jaws, shuddering upon the horny
barb.
Burl was quiet in an ecstasy of terror. He waited for the poison-fangs
to be thrust into him. He knew the process. He had seen the leisurely
fashion in which the giant spiders delicately stung their prey, then
withdrew to wait without impatience for the poison to do its work.
When their victim had ceased to struggle, they drew near again, and
sucked the sweet juices from the body, first from one point and then
another, until what had so recently been a creature vibrant with life
became a shrunken, withered husk--to be flung from the web at nightfall.
Most spiders are tidy housekeepers, destroying their snares daily to
spin anew.
The bloated, evil creature moved meditatively about the shining sheet of
silk it had cast over the man and the giant tarantula when they fell
from the cliff above. Now only the tarantula moved feebly. Its body was
outlined by a bulge in the concealing shroud, throbbing faintly as it
still struggled with the spear in its vitals. The irregularly rounded
protuberance offered a point of attack for the web spider. It moved
quickly forward, and stung.
Galvanized into fresh torment by this new agony, the tarantula writhed
in a very hell of pain. Its legs, clustered about the spear still
fastened into its body, struck out purposelessly, in horrible gestures
of delirious suffering. Burl screamed as one of them touched him, and
struggled himself.
His arms and head were free beneath the silken sheet because of the
grease and oil that coated them. He clutched at the threads about him
and strove to draw himself away from his deadly neighbor. The threads
did not break, but they parted one from another, and a tiny opening
appeared. One of the tarantula's attenuated limbs touched him again.
With the strength of utter panic he hauled himself away, and the opening
enlarged. Another struggle, and Burl's head emerged into the open air,
and he stared down for twenty feet upon an open space almost carpeted
with the chitinous remains of his present captor's former victims.
Burl's head was free, and his breast and arms. The fish slung over his
shoulder had shed its oil upon him impartially. But the lower part of
his body was held firm by the gummy snare of the web-spider, a snare far
more tenacious than any bird-lime ever manufactured by man.
He hung in his tiny window for a moment, despairing. Then he saw, at a
little distance, the bulk of the monster spider, waiting patiently for
its poison to take effect and the struggling of its prey to be stilled.
The tarantula was no more than shuddering now. Soon it would be still,
and the black-bellied creature waiting on the web would approach for its
meal.
Burl withdrew his head and thrust desperately at the sticky stuff about
his loins and legs. The oil upon his hands kept it from clinging to
them, and it gave a little. In a flash of inspiration, Burl understood.
He reached over his shoulder and grasped the greasy fish; tore it in a
dozen places and smeared himself with the now rancid exudation, pushing
the sticky threads from his limbs and oiling the surface from which he
had thrust it away.
He felt the web tremble. To the spider, its poison seemed to have failed
of effect. Another sting seemed to be necessary. This time it would not
insert its fangs into the quiescent tarantula, but would sting where the
disturbance was manifest--would send its deadly venom into Burl.
He gasped, and drew himself toward his window. It was as if he would
have pulled his legs from his body. His head emerged, his
shoulders--half his body was out of the hole.
The colossal spider surveyed him, and made ready to cast more of its
silken sheet upon him. The spinnerets became active, and the sticky
stuff about Burl's feet gave way! He shot out of the opening and fell
sprawling, awkwardly and heavily, upon the earth below, crashing upon
the shrunken shell of a flying beetle which had fallen into the snare
and had not escaped.
Burl rolled over and over, and then sat up. An angry, foot-long ant
stood before him, its mandibles extended threateningly, while its
antennae waved wildly in the air. A shrill stridulation filled the air.
In ages past, when ants were tiny creatures of lengths to be measured in
fractions of an inch, learned scientists debated gravely if their tribe
possessed a cry. They believed that certain grooves upon the body of the
insects, after the fashion of those upon the great legs of the cricket,
might offer the means of uttering an infinitely high-pitched sound too
shrill for man's ears to catch.
Burl knew that the stridulation was caused by the doubtful insect before
him, though he had never wondered how it was produced. The cry was used
to summon others of its city, to help it in its difficulty or good
fortune.
Clickings sounded fifty or sixty feet away. Comrades were coming to aid
the pioneer. Harmless save when interfered with--all save the army ant,
that is--the whole ant tribe was formidable when aroused. Utterly
fearless, they could pull down a man and slay him as so many infuriated
fox terriers might have done thirty thousand years before.
* * * * *
Burl fled, without debate, and nearly collided with one of the
anchoring cables of the web from which he had barely escaped a moment
before. He heard the shrill sound behind him suddenly subside. The ant,
short-sighted as all ants were, no longer felt itself threatened and
went peacefully about the business Burl had interrupted, that of finding
among the gruesome relics beneath the spider's web some edible carrion
which might feed the inhabitants of its city.
Burl sped on for a few hundred yards, and stopped. It behooved him to
move carefully. He was in strange territory, and as even the most
familiar territory was full of sudden and implacable dangers, unknown
lands were doubly or trebly perilous.
Burl, too found difficulty in moving. The glutinous stuff from the
spider's shroud of silk still stuck to his feet and picked up small
objects as he went along. Old ant-gnawed fragments of insect armour
pricked him even through his toughened soles.
He looked about cautiously and removed them, took a dozen steps and had
to stop again. Burl's brain had been uncommonly stimulated of late. It
had gotten him into at least one predicament--due to his invention of a
spear--but had no less readily led to his escape from another. But for
the reasoning that had led him to use the grease from the fish upon his
shoulder in oiling his body when he struggled out of the spider's snare,
he would now be furnishing a meal for that monster.
Cautiously, Burl looked all about him. He seemed to be safe. Then, quite
deliberately, he sat down to think. It was the first time in his life
that he had done such a thing. The people of his tribe were not given to
meditation. But an idea had struck Burl with all the force of
inspiration--an abstract idea.
When he was in difficulties, something within him seemed to suggest a
way out. Would it suggest an inspiration now? He puzzled over the
problem. Childlike--and savage-like--the instant the thought came to
him, he proceeded to test it out. He fixed his gaze upon his foot. The
sharp edges of pebbles, of the remains of insect-armour, of a dozen
things, hurt his feet when he walked. They had done so ever since he had
been born, but never had his feet been sticky so that the irritation
continued with him for more than a single step.
Now he gazed upon his foot, and waited for the thought within him to
develop. Meanwhile, he slowly removed the sharp-pointed fragments, one
by one. Partly coated as they were with the half-liquid gum from his
feet, they clung to his fingers as they had to his feet, except upon
those portions where the oil was thick as before.
Burl's reasoning, before, was simple and of the primary order. Where oil
covered him, the web did not. Therefore he would coat the rest of
himself with oil. Had he been placed in the same predicament again, he
would have used the same means of escape. But to apply a bit of
knowledge gained in one predicament to another difficulty was something
he had not yet done.
A dog may be taught that by pulling on the latchstring of a door he may
open it, but the same dog coming to a high and close-barred gate with a
latchstring attached, will never think of pulling on this second
latchstring. He associates a latchstring with the opening of the door.
The opening of a gate is another matter entirely.
Burl had been stirred to one invention by imminent peril. That is not
extraordinary. But to reason in cold blood, as he presently did, that
oil on his feet would nullify the glue upon his feet and enable him
again to walk in comfort--that was a triumph. The inventions of savages
are essentially matters of life and death, of food and safety. Comfort
and luxury are only produced by intelligence of a high order.
Burl, in safety, had added to his comfort. That was truly a more
important thing in his development than almost any other thing he could
have done. He oiled his feet.
It was an almost infinitesimal problem, but Burl's struggles with the
mental process of reasoning were actual. Thirty thousand years before
him, a wise man had pointed out that education is simply training in
thought, in efficient and effective thinking. Burl's tribe had been too
much preoccupied with food and mere existence to think, and now Burl,
sitting at the base of a squat toadstool that all but concealed him,
reexemplified Rodin's "Thinker" for the first time in many generations.
For Burl to reason that oil upon the soles of his feet would guard him
against sharp stones was as much a triumph of intellect as any
masterpiece of art in the ages before him. Burl was learning how to
think.
He stood up, walked, and crowed in sheer delight, then paused a moment
in awe of his own intelligence. Thirty-five miles from his tribe, naked,
unarmed, utterly ignorant of fire, of wood, of any weapons save a spear
he had experimented with the day before, abysmally uninformed concerning
the very existence of any art or science, Burl stopped to assure himself
that he was very wonderful.
Pride came to him. He wished to display himself to Saya, these things
upon his feet, and his spear. But his spear was gone.
* * * * *
With touching faith in the efficacy of this new pastime, Burl sat
promptly down again and knitted his brows. Just as a superstitious
person, once convinced that by appeal to a favorite talisman he will be
guided aright, will inevitably apply to that talisman on all occasions,
so Burl plumped himself down to think.
These questions were easily answered. Burl was naked. He would search
out garments for himself. He was weaponless. He would find himself a
spear. He was hungry--and would seek food, and he was far from his
tribe, so he would go to them. Puerile reasoning, of course, but
valuable, because it was consciously reasoning, consciously appealing to
his mind for guidance in difficulty, deliberate progress from a mental
desire to a mental resolution.
Even in the high civilization of ages before, few men had really used
their brains. The great majority of people had depended upon machines
and their leaders to think for them. Burl's tribefolk depended on their
stomachs. Burl, however, was gradually developing the habit of thinking
which makes for leadership and which would be invaluable to his little
tribe.
He stood up again and faced upstream, moving slowly and cautiously, his
eyes searching the ground before him keenly and his ears alert for the
slightest sound of danger. Gigantic butterflies, riotous in coloring,
fluttered overhead through the misty haze. Sometimes a grasshopper
hurtled through the air like a projectile, its transparent wings beating
the air frantically. Now and then a wasp sped by, intent upon its
hunting, or a bee droned heavily along, anxious and worried, striving in
a nearly flowerless world to gather the pollen that would feed the hive.
Here and there Burl saw flies of various sorts, some no larger than his
thumb, but others the size of his whole hand. They fed upon the juices
that dripped from the maggot-infested mushrooms, when filth more to
their liking was not at hand.
Very far away a shrill roaring sounded faintly. It was like a multitude
of clickings blended into a single sound, but was so far away that it
did not impress itself upon Burl's attention. He had all the strictly
localized vision of a child. What was near was important, and what was
distant could be ignored. Only the imminent required attention, and Burl
was preoccupied.
Had he listened, he would have realized that army ants were abroad in
countless millions, spreading themselves out in a broad array and eating
all they came upon far more destructively than so many locusts.
Locusts in past ages had eaten all green things. There were only giant
cabbages and a few such tenacious rank growths in the world that Burl
knew. The locusts had vanished with civilization and knowledge and the
greater part of mankind, but the army ants remained as an invincible
enemy to men and insects, and the most of the fungus growths that
covered the earth.
Burl did not notice the sound, however. He moved forward, briskly though
cautiously, searching with his eyes for garments, food, and weapons. He
confidently expected to find all of them within a short distance.
Surely enough he found a thicket--if one might call it so--of edible
fungi no more than half a mile beyond the spot where he had improvised
his sandals to protect the soles of his feet.
Without especial elation, Burl tugged at the largest until he had broken
off a food supply for several days. He went on, eating as he did so,
past a broad plain a mile and more across, being broken into odd little
hillocks by gradually ripening and suddenly developing mushrooms with
which he was unfamiliar.
The earth seemed to be in process of being pushed aside by rounded
protuberances of which only the tips showed. Blood-red hemispheres
seemed to be forcing aside the earth so they might reach the outer air.
Burl looked at them curiously, and passed among them without touching
them. They were strange, and to him most strange things meant danger. In
any event, he was full of a new purpose now. He wished garments and
weapons.
Above the plain a wasp hovered, a heavy object dangling beneath its
black belly, ornamented by a single red band. It was a wasp--the hairy
sand-wasp--and it was bringing a paralyzed gray caterpillar to its
burrow.
Burl watched it drop down with the speed and sureness of an arrow, pull
aside a heavy, flat stone, and descend into the ground. It had a
vertical shaft dug down for forty feet or more.
It descended, evidently inspected the interior, reappeared, and vanished
into the hole again, dragging the gray worm after it. Burl, marching on
over the broad plain that seemed stricken with some erupting disease
from the number of red pimples making their appearance, did not know
what passed below, but observed the wasp emerge again and busily scratch
dirt and stones into the shaft until it was full.
The wasp had paralyzed a caterpillar, taken it to the already prepared
burrow, laid an egg upon it, and rilled up the entrance. In course of
time the egg would hatch into a grub barely as long as Burl's
forefinger, which would then feed upon the torpid caterpillar until it
had waxed large and fat. Then it would weave itself a chrysalis and
sleep a long sleep, only to wake as a wasp and dig its way to the open
air.
Burl reached the farther side of the plain and found himself threading
the aisles of one of the fungus forests in which the growths were
hideous, misshapen travesties upon the trees they had supplanted.
Bloated, yellow limbs branched off from rounded, swollen trunks. Here
and there a pear-shaped puff-ball, Burl's height and half as much again,
waited craftily until a chance touch should cause it to shoot upward a
curling puff of infinitely fine dust.
Burl went cautiously. There were dangers here, but he moved forward
steadily, none the less. A great mass of edible mushroom was slung under
one of his arms, and from time to time he broke off a fragment and ate
of it, while his large eyes searched this way and that for threats of
harm.
Behind him, a high, shrill roaring had grown slightly in volume and
nearness, but was still too far away to impress Burl. The army ants were
working havoc in the distance. By thousands and millions, myriads upon
myriads, they were foraging the country, clambering upon every eminence,
descending into every depression, their antennae waving restlessly and
their mandibles forever threateningly extended. The ground was black
with them, each was ten inches and more in length.
A single such creature would be formidable to an unarmed and naked man
like Burl, whose wisest move would be flight, but in their thousands and
millions they presented a menace from which no escape seemed possible.
They were advancing steadily and rapidly, shrill stridulations and a
multitude of clickings marking their movements.
The great helpless caterpillars upon the giant cabbages heard the sound
of their coming, but were too stupid to flee. The black multitudes
covered the rank vegetables, and tiny but voracious jaws began to tear
at the flaccid masses of flesh.
Each creature had some futile means of struggling. The caterpillars
strove to throw off their innumerable assailants by writhings and
contortions, wholly ineffective. The bees fought their entrance to the
gigantic hives with stings and wingbeats. The moths took to the air in
helpless blindness when discovered by the relentless throngs of small
black insects which reeked of formic acid and left the ground behind
them denuded in every living thing.
Before the oncoming horde was a world of teeming life, where mushrooms
and fungi fought with thinning numbers of giant cabbages for foothold.
Behind the black multitude was--nothing. Mushrooms, cabbages, bees,
wasps, crickets. Every creeping and crawling thing that did not get
aloft before the black tide reached it was lost, torn to bits by tiny
mandibles. Even the hunting spiders and tarantulas fell before the host
of insects, having killed many in their final struggles, but overwhelmed
by sheer numbers. And the wounded and dying army ants made food for
their sound comrades.
There is no mercy among insects. Only the web-spiders sat unmoved and
immovable in their colossal snares, secure in the knowledge that their
gummy webs would discourage attempts at invasion along the slender
supporting cables.
Surging onward, flowing like a monstrous, murky tide over the yellow,
steaming earth, the army ants advanced. Their vanguard reached the
river, and recoiled. Burl was perhaps five miles distant when they
changed their course, communicating the altered line of march to those
behind them in some mysterious fashion of transmitting intelligence.
Thirty thousand years before, scientists had debated gravely over the
means of communication among ants. They had observed that a single ant
finding a bit of booty too large for him to handle alone would return to
the ant-city and return with others. From that one instance they deduced
a language of gestures made with the antennae.
Burl had no wise theories. He merely knew facts, but he knew that the
ants had some form of speech or transmission of ideas. Now, however, he
was moving cautiously along toward the stamping grounds of his tribe, in
complete ignorance of the black blanket of living creatures creeping
over the ground toward him.
A million tragedies marked the progress of the insect army. There was a
tiny colony of mining bees--Zebra bees--a single mother, some four feet
long, had dug a huge gallery with some ten cells, in which she laid her
eggs and fed her grubs with hard-gathered pollen. The grubs had waxed
fat and large, became bees, and laid eggs in their turn, within the
gallery their mother had dug out for them.
Ten such bulky insects now foraged busily for grubs within the ancestral
home, while the founder of the colony had grown draggled and wingless
with the passing of time. Unable to forage herself, the old bee became
the guardian of the nest or hive, as is the custom among the mining
bees. She closed the opening of the hive with her head, making a living
barrier within the entrance, and withdrawing to give entrance and exit
only to duly authenticated members of the extensive colony.
The ancient and draggled concierge of the underground dwelling was at
her post when the wave of army ants swept over her. Tiny, evil-smelling
feet trampled upon her. She emerged to fight with mandible and sting for
the sanctity of the hive. In a moment she was a shaggy mass of biting
ants, rending and tearing at her chitinous armour. The old bee fought
madly, viciously, sounding a buzzing alarm to the colonists yet within
the hive. They emerged, fighting as they came, for the gallery leading
down was a dark flood of small insects.
* * * * *
For a few moments a battle such as would make an epic was in progress.
Ten huge bees, each four to five feet long, fighting with legs and jaw,
wing and mandible, with all the ferocity of as many tigers. The tiny,
vicious ants covered them, snapping at their multiple eyes, biting at
the tender joints in their armour--sometimes releasing the larger prey
to leap upon an injured comrade wounded by the huge creature they
battled in common.
The fight, however, could have but one ending. Struggle as the bees
might, herculean as their efforts might be, they were powerless against
the incredible numbers of their assailants, who tore them into tiny
fragments and devoured them. Before the last shred of the hive's
defenders had vanished, the hive itself was gutted alike of the grubs it
had contained and the food brought to the grubs by such weary effort of
the mature bees.
The army ants went on. Only an empty gallery remained, that and a few
fragments of tough armour, unappetizing even to the omniverous ants.