THE VENDETTA
This is the story of a fight. In the first story of this book, I said that Mary and I had seen a remarkable fight one evening at sundown on the slopes of the bare brown foothills west of the campus. It was not a battle of armies—we have seen that, too, in the little world we watch,—but a combat of gladiators, a struggle between two champions born and bred for fighting, and particularly for fighting each other. One champion was Eurypelma, the great, black, hairy, eight-legged, strong-fanged tarantula of California, and the other was Pepsis, a mighty wasp in dull-blue mail, with rusty-red wings and a poisonous javelin of a sting that might well frighten either you or me. Do you have any wasp in your neighborhood of the ferocity and strength and size of Pepsis? If not, you can hardly realize what a terrible creature she is. With her strong hard-cased body an inch and a half long, borne on powerful wings that expand fully three inches, and her long and strong needle-pointed sting that darts in and out like a flash and is always full of virulent poison, Pepsis is certainly queen of all the wasp amazons. But if that is so, no less is Eurypelma greatest, most dreadful, and fiercest, and hence king, of all the spiders in this country. In South America and perhaps elsewhere in the tropics, live the fierce bird-spiders with thick legs extending three inches or more on each side of their ugly hairy bodies. Eurypelma, the California tarantula, is not quite so large as that, nor does he stalk, pounce on and kill little birds as his South American cousin is said to do, but he is nevertheless a tremendous and fear-inspiring creature among the small beasties of field and meadow.
But not all Eurypelmas are so ferocious; or at least are not ferocious all the time. There are individual differences among them. Perhaps it is a matter of age or health. Anyway, I had a pet tarantula which I kept in an open jar in my room for several weeks, and I could handle him with impunity. He would sit gently on my hand, or walk deliberately up my arm, with his eight, fixed, shining, little reddish eyes staring hard at me, and his long seven-jointed hairy legs swinging gently and rhythmically along, without a sign of hesitation or excitement. His hair was almost gray and perhaps this hoariness and general sedateness betokened a ripe old age. But his great fangs were unblunted, his supply of poison undiminished, and his skill in striking and killing his prey still perfect, as often proved at his feeding times. He is quite the largest Eurypelma I have ever seen. He measures—for I still have his body, carefully stuffed, and fastened on a block with legs all spread out—five inches from tip to tip of opposite legs.
At the same time that I had this hoary old tarantula, I had another smaller, coal-black fellow who went into a perfect ecstasy of anger and ferocity every time any one came near him. He would stand on his hind legs and paw wildly with fore legs and palpi, and lunge forward fiercely at my inquisitive pencil. I found him originally in the middle of an entry into a classroom, holding at bay an entire excited class of art students armed with mahl-sticks and paint-brushes. The students were mostly women, and I was hailed as deliverer and greatest dompteur of beasts when I scooped Eurypelma up in a bottle and walked off with him.
But this is not telling of the sundown fight that Mary and I saw together. We had been over to the sand-cut by the golf links, after mining-bees, and were coming home with a fine lot of their holes and some of the bees themselves, when Mary suddenly called to me to "see the nice tarantula."
Perhaps nice isn't the best word for him, but he certainly was an unusually imposing and fluffy-haired and fierce-looking brute of a tarantula. He had rather an owly way about him, as if he had come out from his hole too early and was dazed and half-blinded by the light. Tarantulas are night prowlers; they do all their hunting after dark, dig their holes and, indeed, carry on all the various businesses of their life in the night-time. The occasional one found walking about in daytime has made a mistake, someway, and he blunders around quite like an owl in the sunshine.
All of a sudden, while Mary and I were smiling at this too early bird of a tarantula, he went up on his hind legs in fighting attitude, and at the same instant down darted a great tarantula hawk, that is, a Pepsis wasp. Her armored body glinted cool and metallic in the red sunset light, and her great wings had a suggestive shining of dull fire about them. She checked her swoop just before reaching Eurypelma, and made a quick dart over him, and then a quick turn back, intending to catch the tarantula in the rear. But lethargic and owly as Eurypelma had been a moment before, he was now all alertness and agility. He had to be. He was defending his life. One full fair stab of the poisoned javelin, sheathed but ready at the tip of the flexible, blue-black body hovering over him, and it would be over with Eurypelma. And he knew it. Or perhaps he didn't. But he acted as if he did. He was going to do his best not to be stabbed; that was sure. And Pepsis was going to do her best to stab; that also was quickly certain.
At the same time Pepsis knew—or anyway acted as if she did—that to be struck by one or both of those terrible vertical, poison-filled fangs was sure death. It would be like a blow from a battle-axe, with the added horror of mortal poison poured into the wound.
So Eurypelma about-faced like a flash, and Pepsis was foiled in her strategy. She flew up and a yard away, then returned to the attack. She flew about in swift circles over his head, preparatory to darting in again. But Eurypelma was ready. As she swooped viciously down, he lunged up and forward with a half-leap, half-forward fall, and came within an ace of striking the trailing blue-black abdomen with his reaching fangs. Indeed it seemed to Mary and me as if they really grazed the metallic body. But evidently they had not pierced the smooth armor. Nor had Pepsis in that breathless moment of close quarters been able to plant her lance. She whirled up, high this time but immediately back, although a little more wary evidently, for she checked her downward plunge three or four inches from the dancing champion on the ground. And so for wild minute after minute it went on; Eurypelma always up and tip-toeing on those strong hind legs, with open, armed mouth always toward the point of attack, and Pepsis ever darting down, up, over, across, and in and out in dizzy dashes, but never quite closing.
Were Mary and I excited? Not a word could we utter; only now and then a swift intake of breath; a stifled "O" or "Ah" or "See." And then of a sudden came the end. Pepsis saw her chance. A lightning swoop carried her right on to the hairy champion. The quivering lance shot home. The poison coursed into the great soft body. But at the same moment the terrible fangs struck fair on the blue armor and crashed through it. Two awful wounds, and the wings of dull fire beat violently only to strike up a little cloud of dust and whirl the mangled body around and around. Fortunately Death was merciful, and the brave amazon made a quick end.
But what of Eurypelma, the killer? Was it well with him? The sting-made wound itself was of little moment; it closed as soon as the lancet withdrew. But not before the delicate poison sac at its base inside the wasp-body had contracted and squirted down the slender hollow of the sting a drop of liquid fire. And so it was not well with Eurypelma in his insides. Victor he seemed to be, but if he could think, he must have had grave doubts about the joys of victory.
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 "assisted," 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."
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, nobody 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 snowbank 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 cañon with its spiry redwood trees pushing 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 shining, 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 passive 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 masses 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."
"I can tell you, Mary," I replied. "For a man who once saw one digging told me. It is this way: First he makes a circular groove the full circumference of the top of the pit. Then he burrows into the sand inside of the groove and piles sand-grains on top of his flat, horny, shovel-like head with his fore feet. This sand he tosses over the groove so that it will fall outside. He works his way all around the groove, doing this over and over, and then makes another groove inside the first, and digs up and tosses the sand out as before. And so on, groove after groove, each inside the one made before, thus gradually making a conical pit with the sides as steep as the loose sand will lie. The pit must always be made in a dry sandy spot, and is usually located in a warm sunny place at the foot of a large rock. This man said that it is easy to get the ant-lions to dig pits in boxes of sand in the house, and so we can try with our 'collected' fellow."
Mary was silent some moments. Then she said softly, "But how will he get anything to eat?"
"Why," said I, "of course we can give him—" Mary looked up at me in a special way she has. I go on, more slowly, but still without very much hesitation: "But, of course, we sha'n't do that, shall we?"
And Mary said quietly: "No, we sha'n't."
We rested our chins on our hands and lay still, looking down over the chaparral-covered hillside and far out across the hazy valley. On the distant bay were little white specks, small schooners that carry wood and tan-bark and hay from the bay towns to San Francisco; and across the blue bay lifted the bare, brown mountains of the Coast Range, with always that gleaming white spot of the Observatory a-tiptop of the highest peak. It was a soft, languid, lazy day. Such a peace-giving, relaxing, healing day! And we were so enveloped by it, Mary and I, that we simply lay still and happy, with hardly a word. I had, of course, intended to give Mary an informing lecture about how the ugly, horrid ant-lion finally stops preying on ants and rolls himself up in a neat little silk-and-sand ball, and changes into a beautiful, slender-bodied, gauzy-winged creature without any resemblance at all to its earlier incarnation. But I didn't. It was too fine a day to spoil with informing lectures.
And so Mary and I lay still and happy. Finally it was time to go. As we went down the road we passed again the place of the pits, and Mary looked once more at the neat little craters with their patient waiting jaws at the bottom.
"I wonder," she said, musingly, "if Mr. Kipling ever saw an ant-lion pit."
"I wonder," said I.
ARGIOPE OF THE SILVER SHIELD
Argiope of the Silver Shield is the handsomest spider that Mary and I know. Do you know a handsomer? Or are you of those who have prejudices, and hold all spiders to be ugly, hateful things? We are so sorry for you if you are, for that means you can never enjoy having a pet Argiope. The truth is, Mary and I like clever and skillful people, but when we can't find that kind, we rather prefer clever and skillful spiders and wasps or other lowly beasties to the other sort of people, which shows just how far a fancy for nature may lead one.
It is rather bad, of course, to prefer to chum with a spider, even such a wonderfully handsome and clever one as Argiope, instead of with a human soul. But that isn't our situation exactly. We prefer human souls to anything else on earth, but not human stomachs and livers and human bones and muscles and sick human nerves. And, someway, too many people leave on one an impression of bowels or sore eyes rather than one of mind and soul. So we rush to the fields or woods or roads after such an experience and live a while with the keen bright eyes, the sensitive feelers, the dexterous feet and claws and teeth, and the sharp wits of the small folk who, while not human, are nevertheless inhabitants and possessors of this earth, side by side with us, and are truly our blood-cousins, though some incredible number of generations removed.
Mary and I scraped acquaintance with our Argiope in a cypress-tree. That is, Argiope had her abiding-place there; she was there on her great symmetrical orb-web, with its long strong foundation lines, its delicate radii and its many circles with their thousands of tiny drops of viscid stuff to make them sticky. In the center was the hub, her resting-place, whence the radii ran out, and where she had spun a broad zigzaggy band of white silk on which she stood or sat head downward. Her eight long, slender, sensitive legs were outstretched and rested by their tips lightly on the bases of the taut radii so that they could feel the slightest disturbance in the web. These many radii, besides supporting the sticky circles or spiral, which was the real catching part of the web, acted like so many telegraph lines to carry news of the catching to waiting Argiope at the center.
I have said that Mary and I think Argiope of the Silver Shield the most handsome spider we know. There are, however, other Argiopes to dispute the glory with our favorite; for example, a golden-yellow-and-black one and another beautiful silver-and-russet one. Other people, too, may fancy other spiders; perhaps the little pink-and-white crab-spiders of the flower-cups, or the curious spiny Acrosomas and Gasteracanthas with their brilliant colors and bizarre patterns and shape. Others may like the strawberry Epeira, or the diadem-spider, or the beautiful Nephilas. There are enough kinds and colors and shapes of spiders to satisfy all tastes. But we like best and admire most the long-legged, agile, graceful Argiopes, and particularly her of the silver shield. Her full, firm body with its flat, shield-shaped back, all shining silver and crossed by staring black-and-yellow stripes, the long tapering legs softly ringed with brown and yellow, the shining black eyes on their little rounded hillock of a forehead, and the broad, brown under body with eight circular silver spots; all go to make our Argiope a richly dressed and stately queen of spiders. But the royal consort—O, the less said of him, the better. A veritable dwarf; insignificant, inconspicuous and afraid for his life of his glorious mate. How such a queen could ever—but there, how tiresome, for that is what gets said of most matches, royal or plebeian.
Mary and I brought Argiope in from her home in the cypress-tree and put her in a fine, roomy, light and airy cage, where she could live quietly and unmolested by enemies, and where we could see to it that she should not lack for food. There are many of the small creatures with which we get acquainted that do not object at all to being brought into our well-lighted, well-ventilated, warm vivarium—that means live-room. Creatures of sedentary habits, and all the web-making spiders are of course that, ought not to object at all and usually do not seem to. For they get two things that they cannot be sure of outside: protection and plenty of food. Argiope seemed perfectly content and settled right down to spinning a glistening new web, a marvel of symmetry and skillful construction, in her roomy cage, and in a day or two was seated quietly but watchfully on the broad-banded hub in the center, with her toes on her telegraph lines, ready for good news. It was, of course, our duty to see that she was not disappointed.
The message she wanted was from some struggling fly fastened anywhere in the broad expanse of web. So we tossed in a fly. It buzzed about a moment, then blundered into the web which it shook violently in its struggle to escape. Argiope rushed at once out upon the web.
"How can she run about on the sticky web without getting caught, too?" interrupts Mary.
I think a moment, then with some dignity reply: "Pretty soon, please, Mary."
Argiope, I repeat, rushed at once out upon the web, seized the fly in her jaws and ran back to the hub with it, where she appeared to wet it all over, squeeze it into a ball and then proceed to feed upon it, holding and manipulating it skillfully all the time in her jaws. Evidently Argiope was very hungry, for as you will see, this is not her usual way of taking care of her prey.
"Now, Mary, what was it you asked?"
"Oh, just how the spider can run around so fast on the web without sticking to it and getting caught or tearing it all to pieces."
"Ah,—ah, yes. Well, Mary, I don't know! that is, exactly; or, well not even very close to exactly. But she does it, you see."
"Yes, I see," said Mary, demurely, and—can it be that Mary is slightly winking one eye? I do hope not.
"Of course you know, Mary, that the web is made of two kinds of silk or rather two kinds of lines? Oh, you didn't know?" Mary has shaken her head.
"Well it is," I continue, with my usual manner of teacher-who-knows somewhat restored again. "The foundation lines, the radii and a first set of circles are all made of lines without any sticky stuff on them. As you see"—and I touch my pencil confidently to a radius, with the manner of a parlor magician. "Then the spider, on this foundation, spins in another long spiral, the present circles of the web, which is liberally supplied with tiny, shining droplets of viscid silk that never dries, but stays moist and very sticky all the time. This is the true catching part of the web."
"We surely must watch her spin a web sometime," breaks in eager Mary.
"We certainly must," say I, and continue. "Now perhaps when Argiope runs out on the web from her watching-place at the hub, she only puts her long delicate feet on the unsticky radii. Or perhaps her feet are made in some peculiar way so that they do not stick to the circles. As a matter of fact, a spider's foot is remarkably fashioned, with curious toothed claws, and hosts of odd hairs, some knobbed, some curved and hook-like, and some forming dense little brushes. But after all, Mary, the truth is, I don't know really how it is that spiders can run about over their webs without getting stuck to them."
After my long discursus about web-making and spider's feet, it seemed time to give Argiope another fly. Indeed her bright little black eyes seemed to Mary to be shining with eagerness for more fly, although she still had the remains of the first one in her jaws—gracious, Argiope's jaws, please, not Mary's!
So we tossed in another fly. We hope you won't think this cruel. But flies are what Argiope eats, and if she was out in the garden, she would be catching them, and, what is worse, they would not be the disgusting and dangerous house-flies and bluebottles that we feed her, but all sorts of innocent and beautiful little picture-winged flower-flies and pomace-flies and what not. House-flies and stable-flies and bluebottles are truly dangerous because they help spread human diseases, especially typhoid fever. So if we are to live safely they should be killed. Or, better, prevented from hatching and growing at all.
So we tossed in another fly. Argiope immediately dropped the nearly finished first fly into the web, ran out to the new one and pounced on it, seizing it with her fore legs. Then she doubled her abdomen quickly underneath her and there issued from the spinnerets at its tip a jet, a flat jet of silk, which was caught up by the hind feet and wrapped around the fly as it was rolled over and over by the front feet. She tumbled it about, all the time wrapping it with the issuing band of silk, until it was completely enswathed. Then she left it fastened in the web, went back to the hub, and resumed her feeding on the first fly. But soon she finished this entirely, dropped the wreck out of the web and went out and got the second fly, bringing it back to the hub to eat.
"But why," asked Mary, "does Argiope wrap the fly up so carefully in silk? Why not just kill it by biting, and then leave it in the web until she wants it?"
"Perhaps," I answer, "she wants to make it helpless before she comes to close quarters with it. You notice she holds it away from her body with her fore feet and pulls the silk band out far with her hind feet so that her body does not touch the fly at all while she wraps it. Perhaps she is not sure that it isn't a bee or some other stinging insect. It buzzes loud enough to make me think it a bee."
So Mary and I decided to try some experiments with our Argiope to find out, if possible, first, if she could tell a bee from a fly, and second, if so, whether she treated it differently, and third, why she wraps her prey up so carefully before coming to too close quarters with it. We feel quite proud of these experiments because we seemed to be doing something really scientific; and we know that Experimental Zoology, that is, studying animals by experimenting with them, is quite the most scientific thing going nowadays among professional naturalists. So here are our notes exactly as we wrote them during our experimenting. This is, of course, the correct manner for publishing real scientific observations, because it gives the critical reader a chance to detect flaws in our technique!
OUR NOTES ON THE BEHAVIOR OF ARGIOPE
"Nov. 18, 4:45 p.m.; released a fly in the cage. The spider pounced upon it, seized it with fore and third pair of legs, threw out a band of silk and enswathed it, tumbling it over and over with her hind feet about thirteen times, hence enswathed it in thirteen wrappings of silk. The fly was then disconnected from the web, the spider making but little attempt to mend the gap. It was carried to the hub and eaten. While the feast was going on, a honey-bee [with sting extracted; we didn't want to run any risks with Argiope!] was liberated in the cage. As soon as it touched the web, the spider was upon it, throwing out a band of silk in a sheet a quarter of an inch broad. ['Drawing out' would be more accurate, for the spinnerets cannot spurt out silk; silk is drawn out and given its band character by lightning-like movements of the comb-toothed hind feet.] With her hind legs Argiope turned the bee over and over twenty-five or twenty-six times, thus enswathing it with twenty-five or twenty-six wrappings of the silken sheet.
"No sooner was the bee enswathed than a second bee was liberated in the cage and caught in the web. This was treated by the spider like bee No. 1.
"Nov. 20, 8:15 a.m.; Argiope perfectly still in center of hub, feeding on bee No. 2. The only thing that reveals the feeding is a slight moving of the bee's body as the juices are sucked up. Remains of bee No. 1 dropped to the bottom of the cage.
"Fed all day, 8:15 a.m. to 5 p.m., on bee No. 2.
"At 2:30 p.m., a box-elder bug, which is very ill-smelling, was thrown into the web. Argiope did nothing for three minutes, then went out on the web to it and wrapped, making five complete turns; then went away. Probably not hungry, as she has had two bees and a fly in three days.
"Nov. 21, 8:15 a.m.; box-elder bug finished during last night. Old web replaced by a new one with twenty-nine radii, eleven complete spirals and several partial spirals. The hub is formed of fine irregular webbing about an inch and a half in diameter, without the viscid droplets that cover the spirals. An open space of about a half-inch intervenes between the hub and the beginning of the spirals.
"4:30 p.m.; liberated a fly in the cage. Argiope pounced upon it and began to eat immediately, not taking time or trouble to enswath it.
"While the fly was being devoured, we liberated a strong-smelling box-elder bug in the cage. It flew into the web. Argiope, by a quick movement, turned on the hub toward the bug and stood in halting position for eight seconds, then approached the bug slowly, hesitated for a second or two, then wrapped it about with five wrappings, halted again, and finally finished with five more wrappings. The bug was then attached to the web where it had first touched, the spider passing back to the center and resuming her meal.
"When the fly was finished, Argiope walked over to the bug, grasped it in her mandibles, walked up to the hub, turned herself about so that her head was downward, manipulated the bug with her fore and third pair of feet until it seemed to be in right position for her with reference to the hub of the web, and began to feed.
"5 p.m.; bee liberated in cage with sting not extracted. Argiope leaped instantaneously to the spot where it was caught, enswathed it with great rapidity thirty-seven times, then bit at it, and enswathed it five times more, making forty-two complete wrappings in all, then left it fastened in the web and resumed feeding upon the bug. All the time she was wrapping it, Argiope kept her body well clear of the bee's body, the spinnerets being fully one-half an inch from the bee, making the broad band of issuing silk very noticeable. In biting it, which she seemed to do with marked caution, she of course had to bite through the silken covering.
"A few minutes later a second bee, with sting, was liberated in the cage, caught in the web and rapidly pounced on by the spider. As before, she turned it over and over with great rapidity, using apparently all of her legs. She enswathed it fifty times, bit it, and then wrapped it with five more silken sheets, making fifty-five wrappings in all. Leaving it hung to the web, she went back to the bug.
"Before Argiope had reached the bug, bee No. 3 was caught in the web at the exact spot where bee No. 2 was hung up. In its efforts to disentangle its feet, it shook the whole web violently. In spite of the violent vibration of the web, Argiope pursued her course to the bug at the hub of the web, adjusted herself with head downward, and resumed feeding.
"Query: Did Argiope think the web-shaking due to futile struggles of the well-wrapped bee No. 2, and hence needing no attention?
"Vibration of the web continued. After several seconds had elapsed, Argiope seemed suddenly to realize that her efforts were called for out on the web, for she pounced down as rapidly as before and rolled and tumbled both bees together, enswathing both in the same sheet of silk, never stopping until she had given them fifty-five wrappings. After biting twice, she wrapped them with five more turns, bit again, and wrapped again with seven more turns, making sixty-seven in all. Argiope then returned to her bug.
"Query: Does Argiope distinguish bees from flies?
"Further query: Does Argiope distinguish bees with stings from bees with stings extracted?
"Nov. 22, 9:45 a.m.; Argiope feeding at hub on bees Nos. 2 and 3 introduced into cage yesterday afternoon. With her right second leg she holds taut a line connected with bee No. 1.
"10:25 a.m.; packet dropped to the bottom of the cage, the juices of only one of the bees having been sucked out. The web is constructed at an angle so that anything dropped from the center falls free of it.
"5 p.m.; began feeding again on bee No. 1.
"Nov. 23, 9:30 a.m.; another bee released in cage, caught in web and enswathed approximately thirty turns by Argiope.
"Nov. 25, 8:30 a.m.; the web has been destroyed during the night.
"Nov. 26, Argiope has made an entirely new web.
"Nov. 30, 2 p.m.; gave Argiope a bee with sting. It was wrapped forty-seven times, but not so expeditiously as has been her wont. Later another bee was liberated in the cage, caught and wrapped about forty-five times.
"Dec. 2, 11 a.m.; the body of a live bee was bathed in fluid from the freshly crushed body of a box-elder bug [very malodorous], and the bee liberated in Argiope's cage, and soon caught in the web. The bee was not very lively and did not shake the web violently, but Argiope rushed to it without hesitation, wrapped it with twenty-five turns of silk and returned to the hub of the web.
"Dec. 3; Argiope stayed all day in the upper part of the web, on foundation lines, with head downward.
"Dec. 5; yesterday Argiope moved down to her normal place on the hub. To-day she is on the hub, but in reversed position [head up], and with legs bent and limp, not straight out and stiffened as usual.
"Dec. 6; Argiope hung all day from foundation lines of upper part of web, in reversed position [head up], with legs limp and bent.
"Dec. 7; Argiope hanging by first and second right legs, from upper part of web; barely alive.
"Dec. 8; Argiope dead."