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.
The glittering bodies clustered in already-found places were motionless as if carved from metal. Burl watched them. And then he saw motion overhead.
A slender, brilliant shape appeared, darting swiftly through the air, enlarging into a needle-like body with transparent, shining wings and two huge eyes. It circled and enlarged again, becoming a shimmering dragonfly, twenty feet and more in length. It poised itself abruptly above the pool, and then darted down, its jaws snapping viciously. They snapped again and again. Burl could not follow their slashings. And with each snap the glittering body of a fly vanished.
A second dragonfly appeared and a third. They swooped above the golden pool, snapping in mid-air, making their abrupt and angular turns, creatures of incredible ferocity and beauty. In that mass of buzzing creatures, even the most voracious appetite must soon have been sated, but the slender creatures still darted about in frenzied destruction.
And all this while the loud, contented, deep-bass humming went on as before. Their comrades were slaughtered by the hundreds not forty feet above their heads, but still the glittering rows of red-eyed flies gorged themselves upon the fluid of the pond. The dragonflies feasted until they were unable to devour even a single one more of their chosen prey. But even then they continued to sweep madly above the pool, striking down the buzzing flies though their bodies must perforce remain uneaten.
Some of the dead flies, crushed to pulp by the angry dragonflies, dropped among their feasting brothers. Presently, one of them placed its disgusting proboscis upon the mangled creature. It sipped daintily from the contents of the broken armor. Another joined it and another. In a little while a cluster of them pushed against each other for a chance to join them in a cannibalistic feast.
Burl turned aside and went on, leaving the dragonflies still at their massacre and the flies absorbed and ecstatic at their feast. The feast, indeed, was improved by the rain of murdered brethren from overhead.
Only a few miles farther on, Burl came upon a familiar landmark. He knew it well, but had always kept at a safe distance from it. A mass of rock had heaved itself up from the almost level plain over which he traveled to form an out-jutting cliff. At one point the rock overhung, forming an inverted ledge—a roof over nothingness—which had been preempted by a hairy monster and made into a fairy-like dwelling. A white hemisphere clung to the rock, firmly anchored by long cables.
Burl knew the place as one to be feared. A clotho spider had built itself a nest there, from which it emerged to hunt the unwary. Within the silken globe was a monstrosity, resting upon cushions of softest silk. The exterior had been beautiful once. But if one went too near one of the little inverted arches seemingly closed by panels of silk—it would open and out would rush a creature from a dream of hell.
Surely Burl knew this place. Hung upon the walls of the fairy palace were trophies. They had a purpose, of course. Stones and boulders hung there, too, to hold the structure firm against the storm-winds that rarely blew. But amid the stones and fragments of insect-armor there was a very special decoration: the shrunken, dessicated skeleton of a man.
The death of that man had saved Burl's life two years before. They had been together, seeking a new source of edible mushroom. The clotho spider was a hunter, not a spinner of webs. It had sprung suddenly from behind a great puffball as the two men froze in horror. Then it had come forward and deliberately chosen its victim. It did not choose Burl.
Now he looked with half-frightened speculation at the lair of his ancient enemy. Some day, perhaps....
But now he passed on. He went past the thicket in which the great moths hid by day, past the slimy pool in which something unknown but terrible lurked. He penetrated the little forest of mushrooms that glowed at night and the place where the truffle-hunting beetles chirped thunderously during the dark hours.
And then he saw Saya. He caught a flash of pink skin vanishing behind a squat toadstool, and he ran forward calling her name. She emerged, and saw the figure with the horrible bulk of the spider on its back. She cried out in horror, and Burl understood. He let his burden fall, running swiftly to her.
They met. Saya waited timidly until she saw who this man was, and then she was astounded indeed. With golden plumes rising from his head, a velvet cloak about his shoulders, blue moth-fur about his middle, and a spear in his hand—and a dead spider behind him!—this was not the Burl she had known.
He took her hands, babbling proudly. She stared at him and at his victim—but the language of men had diminished sadly—struggling to comprehend. Presently her eyes glowed. She pulled at his wrists.
When they found the other tribesmen, they were carrying the dead spider between them, Saya looking more proud than Burl.
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