How did I know what the ants had for dinner last Monday? It is odd that
I should have known, but I’ll tell you how it happened.
I was sitting under a big pine tree, high up on a hillside. The
hillside was more than seven thousand feet above the sea, and that
is higher than many mountains which people travel hundreds of miles
to look at. But this hillside was in Colorado, so there was nothing
wonderful in being up so high.
I had been watching the great mountains with snow on them, and the
great forests of pine trees—miles and miles of them—so close together
that it looks as if you could lie down on their tops and not fall
through; and my eyes were tired with looking at such great, grand
things, so many miles off.
So I looked down on the ground where I was sitting, and watched the
ants which were running about everywhere, as busy and restless as if
they had the whole world on their shoulders.
Suddenly I saw a tiny caterpillar, which seemed to be bounding along in
a very strange way. In a second more I saw an ant seize hold of him and
begin to drag him off.
The caterpillar was three times as long as the ant, and his body was
more than twice as large round as the biggest part of the ant’s body.
“Ho! ho! Mr. Ant,” said I, “you needn’t think you’re going to be strong
enough to drag that fellow very far.”
Why, it was about the same thing as if you or I should drag off a
calf, which was kicking and struggling all the time; only that the
calf hasn’t half so many legs to catch hold of things with as the
caterpillar had.
Poor caterpillar! how he did try to get away! But the ant never gave
him a second’s time to take a good grip of anything; and he was cunning
enough, too, to drag him on his side, so that he couldn’t use his legs
very well.
Up and down, and under and over stones and sticks; in and out of
tufts of grass; up to the very top of the tallest blades, and then
down again; over gravel and sand, and across bridges of pine needles
from stone to stone; backward all the way ran that ant, dragging the
caterpillar after him.
I watched him very closely, thinking, of course, he must be going
toward his house. Presently he darted up the trunk of a pine tree.
“Dear me!” said I, “ants don’t live in trees! What does this mean?”
The bark of the tree was all broken and jagged, and full of seams
twenty times as deep as the height of the ant’s body. But he didn’t
mind; down one side and up the other he went.
They must have been awful chasms to him, and yet he never once stopped
or went a bit slower. I had to watch the ant very closely, not to lose
sight of him altogether.
I began to think that he was merely trying to kill the caterpillar;
that, perhaps, he didn’t mean to eat him, after all. How did I know but
some ants might hunt caterpillars, just as some men hunt deer, for
fun, and not at all because they need food?
If I had been sure of this, I would have spoiled Mr. Ant’s sport for
him very soon, you may be sure, and set the poor caterpillar free. But
I never heard of an ant’s being cruel; and if it were really for dinner
for his family that he was working so hard, I thought he ought to be
helped, and not hindered.
[Illustration]
Just then I heard a sharp cry overhead. I looked up, and there was an
enormous hawk, sailing round in circles, with two small birds flying
after him. They were pouncing down on his head, and then darting away,
and all the time making shrill cries of fright and hatred.
I knew very well what that meant. Mr. Hawk was also out trying to do
some marketing for his dinner. He had his eye on some little birds in
their nest, and there were the father and mother birds driving him away.
You wouldn’t have believed that two such little birds could drive off
such a big creature as the hawk, but they did. They seemed to fairly
buzz round his head just as flies buzz round a horse’s head.
At last he gave up the quest and flew off so far that he vanished in
the blue sky, and the little birds came skimming home again into the
forest.
“Well, well,” said I, “the little people are stronger than the big
ones, after all! Where has my ant gone?”
Sure enough! It hadn’t been two minutes that I had been watching
the hawk and the birds, but in that two minutes the ant and the
caterpillar had disappeared. At last I found them,—where do you think?
In a fold of my coat, on which I was sitting!
The ant was running round and round the caterpillar. I shook the fold
out, and as soon as the cloth lay straight and smooth, the ant fastened
his nippers into his prey and started off as fast as ever.
I suppose if I could have seen his face, and had understood the
language of ants’ features, I should have seen plainly written there,
“Dear me, what sort of a country was that I tumbled into?”
By this time the caterpillar had had the breath pretty well knocked out
of his body, and was so limp and helpless that the ant was not afraid
of his getting away from him. So he stopped now and then to rest.
Sometimes he would spring on the caterpillar’s back, and stretch
himself out there; sometimes he would stand still on one side and look
at him sharply, keeping one nipper on his head.
All the time he was working steadily in one direction; he was headed
for home I felt certain.
It astonished me very much, at first, that none of the ants he met took
any notice of him; they all went on their own way, and never took so
much as a sniff at the caterpillar.
But pretty soon I said to myself, “You stupid woman, not to suppose
that ants can be as well behaved as people! When you passed Mr. Jones
yesterday, you didn’t peep into his market-basket, nor touch the
cabbage he had under his arm.”
Presently the ant dropped the caterpillar, and ran on a few steps—I
mean inches—to meet another ant who was coming towards him. They put
their heads close together for a second.
I could not hear what they said, but I could easily imagine, for they
both ran quickly back to the caterpillar, and one took him by the head
and the other by the tail, and then they lugged him along finely. It
was only a few steps, however, to the ant’s house; that was the reason
he happened to meet this friend just coming out.
The door was a round hole in the ground, about as big as my little
finger. Several ants were standing in the doorway, watching these
two come up with the caterpillar. They all took hold as soon as the
caterpillar was on the doorstep, and almost before I knew he was there,
they had tumbled him down, heels over head, into the ground, and that
was the last I saw of him.
The oddest thing was, how the ants came running home from all
directions. I don’t believe there was any dinner bell rung, though
there might have been one too fine for my ears to hear; but in a
minute, I counted thirty-three ants running down that hole. I fancied
they looked as hungry as wolves.
I had a great mind to dig down into the hole with a stick, and see what
had become of the caterpillar. But I thought it wasn’t quite fair to
take the roof off a man’s house to find out how he cooks his beef for
dinner; so I sat still and wondered whether they would eat him all up
or whether they would leave any for Tuesday; then I went home to my own
dinner.
—_Helen Hunt Jackson._