Burl breathed more easily. He watched with fascinated eyes. Mere death among insects—even tragic death—held no great interest for him. It was too common an occurrence. And there were few insects which deliberately sought man. Most insects have their allotted prey and will seek no others.
But this involved a spider, and spiders have a terrifying impartiality. A spider devouring some luckless insect was but an example of what might happen to Burl. So he watched alertly, his eyes traveling from the enmeshed cricket to the strange opening at the back of the funnel–shaped labyrinth.
That opening darkened. Two shining, glistening eyes had been watching from the tunnel in which the spider had been waiting. Now it swung out lightly, revealing itself as a gray spider, with twin black ribbons upon its thorax and two stripes of curiously speckled brown and white upon its abdomen. Burl saw, also, two curious appendages like a tail, as it came nimbly out of its hiding–place and approached the trapped creature.
The cricket was struggling weakly, now, and the cries it uttered were but feeble, because of the cords that fettered its limbs. Burl saw the spider throw itself upon the cricket which gave one final, convulsive shudder as fangs pierced its armor.
Shortly after, the spider fed. With bestial enjoyment it sucked all the succulence, all the fluid, from its victim's carcass.
Then the breath left Burl in a peculiar, frightened gasp. It was not from anything he saw or heard. It was something that he thought.
For a second, his knees knocked together in self–induced panic. It occurred to him that he, Burl, had killed a hunting spider—a tarantula—upon the red–clay cliff. True, the killing had been an accident and had nearly cost him his own life in the web–spider's snare. But—he had killed a spider and of the most deadly kind. Now it occurred to Burl that he could kill another.
Spiders were the ogres of the human tribes on the forgotten planet. Knowledge of them was hard to come by, because to study them was death. But all men knew that web–spiders never left their traps. Never! And Burl had imagined himself making an impossibly splendid, incredibly daring use of that fact.
Denying to himself that he intended any action so suicidal, he nevertheless drew back from the front of the snare and made his way to the back, where the spider's tunnel was no more than ten feet away.
Then he found himself waiting.
Presently, through the interstices of the silk, he saw the gray bulk of the spider. It had left the drained and shrunken carcass of the cricket to return to its resting–place, settling itself carefully upon the soft walls of the fabric tunnel. From the yielding, globular nest at the tunnel's end it fixed maniacal eyes once more upon the threads of its snare, seen down the length of the passage–way.
Burl's hair stood on end from sheer fright, but he was the slave of an idea.
The tunnel and the nest at its end did not rest on the ground, but were suspended in air by cables like those that spread the gin itself. The gray labyrinth–spider bulged the fabric. It lay in luxurious comfort, waiting for victims to approach.
There was sweat on Burl's face as he raised his spear. The bare idea of attacking a spider was horrifying. But actually he was in no danger whatever before the instant of the spear–thrust, because web–spiders never, never, leave their webs to hunt.
So Burl sweated, and grasped his spear with agonized firmness—and thrust it into the bulge that was the spider's body in its nest. He thrust with hysterical fury.
And then he ran as if the devil were after him.
It was a long time before he dared come back, his heart in his throat. All was still. He had missed the horrid convulsions of the wounded spider; he had not heard the frightful gnashings of its fangs at the piercing weapon, nor seen the silken threads of the tunnel ripped and torn in the spider's death–struggle. Burl came back to quietness. There was a great rent in the silken tunnel, and a puddle of ill–smelling stuff lay upon the ground. From time to time another droplet fell from the spear to join it. And the great spider had fallen half through its own enlargement of the rent made by the spear in the wall of the nest.
Burl stared. Even when he saw it, the thing was not easy to believe. The dead eyes of the spider looked at him with mad, frozen malignity. The fangs were still raised to kill. The hairy legs were still braced as if to enlarge further the gaping hole through which it had partly fallen.
Then Burl felt exultation. His tribe had been furtive vermin for almost forty generations, fleeing from the mighty insects, hiding from them, and when caught waiting helplessly for death, screaming shrilly in horror. But he, Burl, had turned the tables. He, a man, had killed a spider! His breast expanded. Always his tribesmen went quietly and fearfully, making no sound. But a sudden, surprising, triumphant yell burst from Burl's lips—the first hunting–cry of man upon the forgotten planet in two thousand years.
Next second, of course, his pulse almost stopped in sheer terror because he had made such a noise. He listened fearfully. The insect world was oblivious to him. Presently, shuddering but infinitely proud, he drew near his prey. He carefully withdrew his spear, poised to flee if the spider stirred. It did not. It was dead. The blood upon the spear was revolting. Burl wiped it off on a leathery toadstool. Then….
He thought of Saya and his tribesmen. Trembling even as he gloated over his own remarkable self, he shifted the spider and worked it out of the nest. Presently he moved off with the belly of the spider upon his back and two of its hairy legs over his shoulders. The other limbs of the monster hung limp, trailing on the ground behind him.
Marching, then he was the first such spectacle in history. His velvet cloak shining with its irridescent spots, the yard–long scraps of golden antennae bound to his forehead, a spear in his hand, and the hideous bulk of a gray spider for burden—Burl was a very strange sight indeed.
He believed that other creatures fled before him because of the thing he carried. He tended to grow haughty. But actually, of course, insects do not know fear. They recognize their own specific enemies. That is necessary. But the his of the lowlands on the forgotten planet went on abstractedly, despite the splendid feat of one man.
Burl marched. He came upon a valley full of torn and tattered mushrooms. There was not a single yellow top among them. Every one had been infested with maggots that had liquefied the tough meat of the mushroom–tops, causing it to drip to the ground below. The liquid was gathered in a golden pool in the center of the small depression. Burl heard a loud and deep–toned humming before he saw the valley. Then he stopped and looked down.
He saw the golden pond, its surface reflecting the gray sky and the darkened stumps of mushrooms on the hillside which looked as if they had been blackened by a running flame. A small brooklet of golden liquid trickled over a rocky ledge, and all round the edges of the pond and brook, in ranks and rows, by hundreds and by thousands and it seemed by millions, were the green–gold bodies of great flies.
They were small compared to other insects. The flesh–flies laid their eggs by the hundreds in decaying carcasses. The others chose mushrooms to lay their eggs in. To feed the maggots that would hatch, a relatively great quantity of food was needed; therefore, the flies must remain comparatively small, or the body of a single grasshopper would furnish food for only a few maggots instead of the hundreds it must support. There must also be a limit to the size of worms if hundreds were to feast upon a single fungus.
But there was no limitation to the greediness of the adult creatures. There were bluebottles and green–bottles and all the flies of metallic lustre, gathered at a Lucullan feast of corruption. The buzzing of those swarming above the golden pool was a tremendous sound. The flying bodies flashed and glittered as they flew back and forth, seeking a place to alight and join in the orgy.