The Sexton-Beetles
Burl fell headforemost upon the spongy top of a huge toadstool that
split with the impact and let him through to the ground beneath,
powdering him with its fine spores. He came to rest with his naked
shoulder half-way through the yielding flesh of a mushroom-stalk, and
lay there for a second, catching his breath to scream again.
Then he heard the whining buzz of his attempted prey. There was
something wrong with the beetle. Burl's spear had struck it in an
awkward spot, and it was rocketing upward in erratic flight that ended
in a crash two or three hundreds yards away.
Burl sprang up in an instant. Perhaps, despite his mistake, he had slain
this infinitely more worthy victim. He rushed toward the spot where it
had fallen.
His wide blue eyes pierced the darkness well enough to enable him to
sheer off from masses of toadstools, but he could distinguish no
details--nothing but forms. He heard the beetle floundering upon the
ground; then heard it mount again into the air, more clumsily than
before.
Its wing-beats no longer kept up a sustained note. They thrashed the air
irregularly and wildly. The flight was zigzag and uncertain, and though
longer than the first had been, it ended similarly, in a heavy fall.
Another period of floundering, and the beetle took to the air again just
before Burl arrived at the spot.
It was obviously seriously hurt, and Burl forgot the dangers of the
night in his absorption in the chase. He darted after his prey,
fleet-footed and agile, taking chances that in cold blood he would never
have thought of.
Twice, in the pain-racked struggles of the monster beetle, he arrived at
the spot where the gigantic insect flung itself about madly, insanely,
fighting it knew not what, striking out with colossal wings and legs,
dazed and drunk with agony. And each time it managed to get aloft in
flight that was weaker and more purposeless.
Crazy, fleeing from the torturing spear that pierced its very vitals,
the beetle blundered here and there, floundering among the mushroom
thickets in spasms that were constantly more prolonged and more
agonized, but nevertheless flying heavily, lurching drunkenly, managing
to graze the tops of the toadstools in one more despairing, tormented
flight.
And Burl followed, aflame with the fire of the chase, arriving at the
scene of each successive, panic-stricken struggle on the ground just
after the beetle had taken flight again, but constantly more closely on
the heels of the weakening monster.
At last he came up panting, and found the giant lying upon the earth,
moving feebly, apparently unable to rise. How far he was from the tribe,
Burl did not know, nor did the question occur to him at the moment. He
waited for the beetle to be still, trembling with excitement and
eagerness. The struggles of the huge form grew more feeble, and at last
ceased. Burl moved forward and grasped his spear. He wrenched at it to
thrust again.
In an instant the beetle had roused itself, and was exerting its last
atom of strength, galvanized into action by the agony caused by Burl's
seizure of the spear. A great wing-cover knocked Burl twenty feet, and
flung him against the base of a mushroom, where he lay, half stunned.
But then a strangely pungent scent came to his nostrils--the scent of
the red mushrooms!
He staggered to his feet and fled, while behind him the gigantic beetle
crashed and floundered--Burl heard a tearing and ripping sound. The
insect had torn the covering of one of the red mushrooms, tightly packed
with the fatal red dust. At the noise, Burl's speed was doubled, but he
could still hear the frantic struggles of the dying beetle grow to a
very crescendo of desperation.
The creature broke free and managed to rise in a final flight, fighting
for breath and life, weakened and tortured by the spear and the horrible
spores of the red mushrooms. Then it crashed suddenly to the earth and
was still. The red dust had killed it.
In time to come, Burl might learn to use the red dust as poison gas had
been used by his ancestors of thirty thousand years before, but now he
was frightened and alone, lost from his tribe, and with no faintest
notion of how to find them. He crouched beneath a huge toadstool and
waited for dawn, listening with terrified apprehension for the ripping
sound that would mean the bursting of another of the red mushrooms.
Only the wing beats of night-flying creatures came to his ears, however,
and the discordant noises of the four-foot truffle-beetles as they
roamed the aisles of the mushroom forests, seeking the places beneath
which their instinct told them fungoid dainties awaited the courageous
miner. The eternal dripping of the raindrops falling at long intervals
from the overhanging clouds formed a soft obbligato to the whole.
Burl listened, knowing there were red toadstools all about, but not once
during the whole of the long, dark hours did the rending noise tell of a
bursting fungus casting loose its freight of deadly dust upon the air.
Only when day came again, and the chill dampness of the night was
succeeded by the steaming humidity of the morning, did a tall pyramid of
brownish-red stuff leap suddenly into the air from a ripped mushroom
covering.
Then Burl stood up and looked around. Here and there, all over the whole
countryside, slowly and at intervals, the cones of fatal red sprang into
the air. Had Burl lived thirty thousand years earlier, he might have
likened the effect to that of shells bursting from a leisurely
bombardment, but as it was he saw in them only fresh and inexorable
dangers added to an already peril-ridden existence.
A hundred yards from where he had hidden during the night the body of
his victim lay, crumpled up and limp. Burl approached speculatively. He
had come even before the ants appeared to take their toll of the
carcass, and not even a buzzing flesh-fly had placed its maggots on the
unresisting form.
The long, whiplike antennæ lay upon the carpet of mold and rust, and the
fiercely toothed legs were drawn close against the body. The
many-faceted eyes stared unseeingly, and the stiff and horny wing-cases
were rent and torn.
When Burl went to the other side of the dead beetle he saw something
that filled him with elation. His spear had been held between his body
and the beetle's during that mad flight, and at the final crash, when
Burl shot away from the fear-crazed insect, the weight of his body had
forced the spearpoint between the joints of the corselet and the neck.
Even if the red dust had not finished the creature, the spear wound in
time would have ended its life.
Burl was thrilled once more by his superlative greatness, and
conveniently forgot that it was the red dust that had actually
administered the _coup de grâce_. It was so much more pleasant to look
upon himself as the mighty slayer that he hacked off one of the
barb-edged limbs to carry back to his tribe in evidence of his feat. He
took the long antennæ, too, as further proof.
Then he remembered that he did not know where his tribe was to be found.
He had no faintest idea of the direction in which the beetle had flown.
As a matter of fact, the course of the beetle had been in turn directed
toward every point of the compass, and there was no possible way of
telling the relation of its final landing-place to the point from which
it had started.
Burl wrestled with his problem for an hour, and then gave up in disgust.
He set off at random, with the leg of the huge insect flung over his
shoulder and the long antennæ clasped in his hand with his spear. He
turned to look at his victim of the night before just before plunging
into the near-by mushroom forest, and saw that it was already the center
of a mass of tiny black bodies, pulling and hacking at the tough armor,
and carving out great lumps of the succulent flesh to be carried to the
near-by ant city.
In the teeming life of the insect world death is an opportunity for the
survivors. There is a strangely tense and fearful competition for the
bodies of the slain. There had been barely an hour of daylight in which
the ants might seek for provender, yet in that little time the freshly
killed beetle had been found and was being skilfully and carefully
exploited. When the body of one of the larger insects fell to the
ground, there was a mighty rush, a fierce race, among all the tribes of
scavengers to see who should be first.
Usually the ants had come upon the scene and were inquisitively
exploring the carcass long before even the flesh-flies had arrived, who
dropped their living maggots upon the creature. The blue-bottles came
still later, to daub their masses of white eggs about the delicate
membranes of the eye.
And while all the preceding scavengers were at work, furtive beetles and
tiny insects burrowed below the reeking body to attack the highly
scented flesh from a fresh angle.
Each working independently of the others, they commonly appeared in the
order of the delicacy of the sense which could lead them to a source of
food, though accident could and sometimes did afford one group of
workers in putrescence an advantage over the others.
Thus, sometimes a blue-bottle anticipated even the eager ants, and again
the very flesh-flies dropped their squirming offspring upon a limp form
that was already being undermined by white-bellied things working in the
darkness below the body.
Burl grimaced at the busy ants and buzzing flies, and disappeared into
the mushroom forest. Here for a long time he moved cautiously and
silently through the aisles of tangled stalks and the spongy, round
heads of the fungoids. Now and then he saw one of the red toadstools,
and made a wide detour around it. Twice they burst within his sight,
circumscribed as his vision was by the toadstools among which he was
traveling.
Each time he ran hastily to put as much distance as possible between
himself and the deadly red dust. He traveled for an hour or more,
looking constantly for familiar landmarks that might guide him to his
tribe. He knew that if he came upon any place he had seen while with his
tribe he could follow the path they had traveled and in time rejoin
them.
For many hours he went on, alert for signs of danger. He was quite
ignorant of the fact that there were such things as points of the
compass, and though he had a distinct notion that he was not moving in a
straight line, he did not realize that he was actually moving in a
colossal half-circle. After walking steadily for nearly four hours he
was no more than three miles in a direct line from his starting-point.
As it happened, his uncertainty of direction was fortunate.
The night before the tribe had been feeding happily upon one of the
immense edible mushrooms, when they heard Burl's abruptly changing cry.
It had begun as a shout of triumph, and ended as a scream of fear. Then
they heard hurried wing-beats as a creature rose into the air in a
scurry of desperation. The throbbing of huge wings ended in a heavy
fall, followed by another flight.
Velvety darkness masked the sky, and the tribesmen could only stare off
into the blackness, where their leader had vanished, and begin to
tremble, wondering what they should do in a strange country with no bold
chief to guide them.
He was the first man to whom the tribe had ever offered allegiance, but
their submission had been all the more complete for that fact, and his
loss was the more appalling.
Burl had mistaken their lack of timidity. He had thought it
independence, and indifference to him. As a matter of fact, it was
security because the tribe felt safe under his tutelage. Now that he had
vanished, and in a fashion that seemed to mean his death, their old
fears returned to them reenforced by the strangeness of their
surroundings.
They huddled together and whispered their fright to one another,
listening the while in panic-stricken apprehension for signs of danger.
The tribesmen visualized Burl caught in fiercely toothed limbs, being
rent and torn in mid air by horny, insatiable jaws, his blood falling in
great spurts toward the earth below. They caught a faint, reedy cry, and
shuddered, pressing closer together.
And so through the long night they waited in trembling silence. Had a
hunting spider appeared among them they would not have lifted a hand to
defend themselves, but would have fled despairingly, would probably have
scattered and lost touch with one another, and spent the remainder of
their lives as solitary fugitives, snatching fear-ridden rest in strange
hiding-places.
But day came again, and they looked into each other's eyes, reading in
each the selfsame panic and fear. Saya was probably the most pitiful of
all the group. Burl was to have been her mate, and her face was white
and drawn beyond that of any of the rest of the tribefolk.
With the day, they did not move, but remained clustered about the huge
mushroom on which they had been feeding the night before. They spoke in
hushed and fearful tones, huddled together, searching all the horizon
for insect enemies. Saya would not eat, but sat still, staring before
her in unseeing indifference. Burl was dead.
A hundred yards from where they crouched a red mushroom glistened in the
pale light of the new day. Its tough skin was taut and bulging,
resisting the pressure of the spores within. But slowly, as the morning
wore on, some of the moisture that had kept the skin soft and flaccid
during the night evaporated.
The skin had a strong tendency to contract, like green leather when
drying. The spores within it strove to expand. The opposing forces
produced a tension that grew greater and greater as more and more of the
moisture was absorbed by the air. At last the skin could hold no longer.
With a ripping sound that could be heard for hundreds of feet, the tough
wrapping split and tore across its top, and with a hollow, booming noise
the compressed mass of deadly spores rushed into the air, making a
pyramidal cloud of brown-red dust some sixty feet in height.
The tribesmen quivered at the noise and faced the dust cloud for a
fleeting instant, then ran pell-mell to escape the slowly moving tide of
death as the almost imperceptible breeze wafted it slowly toward them.
Men and women, boys and girls, they fled in a mad rush from the deadly
stuff, not pausing to see that even as it advanced it settled slowly to
the ground, nor stopping to observe its path that they might step aside
and let it go safely by.
Saya fled with the rest, but without their extreme panic. She fled
because the others had done so, and ran more carelessly, struggling with
a half-formed idea that it did not particularly matter whether she were
caught or not.
She fell slightly behind the others, without being noticed. Then quite
abruptly a stone turned under her foot, and she fell headlong, striking
her head violently against a second stone. Then she lay quite still
while the red cloud billowed slowly toward her, drifting gently in the
faint, hardly perceptible breeze.
It drew nearer and nearer, settling slowly, but still a huge and
menacing mass of deadly dust. It gradually flattened out, too, so that
though it had been a rounded cone at first, it flowed over the minor
inequalities of the ground as a huge and tenuous leech might have
crawled, sucking from all breathing creatures the life they had within
them.
A hundred and fifty yards away, a hundred yards away, then only fifty
yards away. From where Saya lay unconscious on the earth, eddies within
the moving mass could be seen, and the edges took on a striated
appearance, telling of the curling of the dust wreaths in the larger
mass of deadly powder.
The deliberate advance kept on, seeming almost purposeful. It would have
seemed possible to draw from the unhurried, menacing movement of the
poisonous stuff that some malign intelligence was concealed in it, that
it was, in fact, a living creature. But when the misty edges of the
cloud were no more than twenty-five yards from Saya's prostrate body a
breeze from one side sprang up--a vagrant, fitful little breeze, that
first halted the red cloud and threw it into confusion and then drove it
to one side, so that it passed Saya without harming her, though a single
trailing wisp of dark-red mist floated very close to her.
Then for a time Saya lay still indeed, only her breast rising and
falling gently with faint and irregular breaths. Her head had struck a
sharp-edged stone in her fall, and a tiny pool of sticky red had
gathered from the wound.
Perhaps thirty feet from where she lay, three small toadstools grew in a
little clump, their bases so close together that they seemed but one.
From between two of them, however, just where they parted, twin tufts of
reddish threads appeared, twinkling back and forth, and in and out. As
if they had given some reassuring sign, two slender antennæ followed,
then bulging eyes, and then a small black body which had bright-red
scalloped markings upon the wing-cases.
It was a tiny beetle no more than eight inches long--a burying-beetle.
It drew near Saya's body and clambered upon her, explored the ground by
her side, moving all the time in feverish haste, and at last dived into
the ground beneath her shoulder, casting back a little shower of hastily
dug earth as it disappeared.
Ten minutes later another similar insect appeared, and upon the heels of
the second a third. Each of them made the same hasty examination, and
each dived under the still form. Presently the earth seemed to billow at
a spot along Saya's side, then at another. Perhaps ten minutes after the
arrival of the third beetle a little rampart had reared itself all about
Saya's body, precisely following the outline of her form. Then her body
moved slightly, in a number of tiny jerks, and seemed to settle perhaps
half an inch into the ground.
The burying beetles were of those who exploited the bodies of the
fallen. Working from below, they excavated the earth from the under side
of such prizes as they came upon, then turned upon their backs and
thrust with their legs, jerking the body so it sank into the shallow
excavation they had prepared.
The process would be repeated until at last the whole of the gift of
fortune had sunk below the surrounding surface and the loosened earth
fell in upon the top, thus completing the inhumation.
Then in the darkness the beetles would feast and rear their young,
gorging upon the plentiful supply of succulent foodstuff they had hidden
from jealous fellow scavengers above them.
But Saya was alive. Thirty thousand years before, when scientists
examined into the habits of the burying-beetles, or the sexton-beetles,
they had declared that fresh meat or living meat would not be touched.
They based their statement solely upon the fact that the insects (then
tiny creatures indeed) did not appear until the trap-meat placed by the
investigators had remained untouched for days.
Conditions had changed in thirty thousand years. The ever-present ants
and the sharp-eyed flies were keen rivals of the brightly arrayed
beetles. Usually the tribes of creatures who worked in the darkness
below ground came after the ants had taken their toll, and the flies
sipped daintily.
When Saya fell unconscious upon the ground, however, it was the one
accident that caused the burying-beetle to find her first, before the
ants had come to tear the flesh from her slender, soft-skinned body. She
breathed gently and irregularly, her face drawn with the sorrow of the
night before, while desperately hurrying beetles swarmed beneath her
body, channeling away the earth so that she would sink lower and lower
into the ground.
An inch, and a long wait. Then she sank slowly a second inch. The
bright-red tufts of thread appeared again, and a beetle made his way to
the open air. He moved hastily about, inspecting the progress of the
work. He dived below again. Another inch, and after a long time another
inch was excavated.
Burl stepped out from a group of over-shadowing toadstools and halted.
He cast his eyes over the landscape, and was struck by its familiarity.
It was, in point of fact, very near the spot he had left the night
before, in pursuit of a colossal wounded beetle.
Burl moved back and forth, trying to account for the sensation of
recognition, and then trying to approximate the place from which he had
last seen it.
He passed within fifty feet of the spot where Saya lay, now half buried
in the ground. The loose earth cast up about her body had begun to fall
in little rivulets upon her. One of her shoulders was already screened
from view.
Burl passed on, unseeing. He was puzzling over the direction from which
he had seen the particular section of countryside before him. Perhaps a
little farther on he would come to the place. He hurried a little. In a
moment he recognized his location. There was the great edible mushroom,
half broken away, from which the tribe had been feeding. There were the
mining bee burrows.
His feet stirred up a fine dust, and he stopped short. A red mushroom
had covered the earth with a thin layer of its impalpable, deadly
powder. Burl understood why the tribe had gone, and a cold sweat came
upon his body. Was Saya safe, or had the whole tribe succumbed to the
poisonous stuff? Had they all, men and women and children, died in
convulsions of gasping strangulation?
He hurried to retrace his footsteps. There was a fragment of mushrooms
on the ground. Here was a spear, cast away by one of the tribesmen in
his flight. Burl broke into a run.
The little excavation into which Saya was sinking, inch by inch, was all
of twenty-five feet to the right of the path. Burl dashed on, frantic
with anxiety about the tribe, but most of all about Saya. Saya's body
quivered and sank a fraction more into the earth.
Half a dozen little rivulets of dirt were tumbling upon her body now. In
a matter of minutes she would be hidden from view. Burl ran madly past
her, too busy searching the mushroom thickets before him with his eyes
to dream of looking upon the ground.
Twenty yards from a huge toadstool thicket a noise arrested him sharply.
There was a crashing and breaking of the brittle, spongy growths. Twin
tapering antennæ appeared, and then a monster beetle lurched into the
open space, its horrible, gaping jaws stretched wide.
It was all of eight feet long, and its body was held up from the ground
by six crooked, saw-toothed limbs. Its huge multiple eyes stared with
machinelike preoccupation at the world.
It advanced deliberately, with a clanking and clashing as of a hideous
machine. Burl fled on the instant, running as madly away from the beetle
as he had a moment before been running toward it.
A little depression in the earth was before him. He did not swerve, but
made to leap it. As he shot over it, however, the glint of pink skin
caught his eye, and there was impressed upon his brain with photographic
completeness the picture of Saya, lying limp and helpless, sinking
slowly into the ground, with tiny rills of earth falling down the sides
of the excavation upon her. It seemed to Burl's eye that she quivered
slightly as he saw.
There was a terrific struggle within Burl. Behind him the colossal
meat-eating beetle. Beneath him Saya, whom he loved. There was certain
death lurching toward him on evilly glittering legs, and there was life
for his race and tribe lying in the shallow pit.
He turned, aware with a sudden reckless glow that he was throwing away
his life, aware that he was deliberately giving himself over to death,
and stood on the side of the little pit nearest the great beetle, his
puny spear held defiantly at the ready. In his left hand he held just
such a leg as those which bore the living creature toward him. He had
torn it from the body of just such a monster but a few hours ago, a
monster in whose death he had had a share. With a yell of insane
defiance, he flung the fiercely toothed limb at his advancing opponent.
The sharp teeth cut into the base of one of the beetle's antennæ, and it
ducked clumsily, then seized the missile in its fierce jaws and crushed
it in frenzy of rage. There was meat within it, sweet and juicy meat
that pleased the beetle's palate.
It forgot the man, standing there, waiting for death. It crunched the
missile that had attacked it, eating the palatable contents of the horny
armor, confusing the blow with the object that had delivered it, and
evidently satisfied that an enemy had been conquered and was being
devoured. A moment later it turned and lumbered off to investigate
another mushroom thicket.
And Burl turned quickly and dragged Saya's limp form from the grave that
had been prepared for it by the busy insect scavengers. Earth fell from
her shoulders, from her hair, and from the mass of yellow fur about her
middle, and three little beetles with black and red markings scurried in
terrified haste for cover, while Burl bore Saya to a resting-place of
soft mold.
Burl was an ignorant savage, and to him Saya's deathlike unconsciousness
was like death itself, but dumb misery smote him, and he laid her down
gently, while tears came to his eyes and he called her name again and
again in an agony of grief.
For an hour he sat there beside her, a man so lately pleased with
himself above all creatures for having slain one huge beetle and put
another to flight, as he would have looked upon it, now a
broken-hearted, little pink-skinned man, weeping like a child, hunched
up and bowed over with sorrow.
Then Saya slowly opened her eyes and stirred weakly.