Out of curiosity, they followed the ant that was dragging the grasshopper along the trail. At a certain point, two more ants approached and seemed to offer to help. The human beings watched with interest, expecting to see an instructive example of ant efficiency. In fact, the three ants seemed to have no fixed plan. One of the ants tried to push its way under the grasshopper, with the intention of carrying it; another grabbed it by the wing with its mandibles, while the original ant once again proceeded to drag it backwards. This pulled the grasshopper sideways, so it slid off the back of the carrier, while the membrane of the wing was torn by the force of the pull so that the third ant was left holding a flaky fragment. Then all three proceeded to push, heave and shove without coordinating their efforts, the result being rather less efficient than when a single ant had been pulling alone. The humans found this confusion uproariously funny, and shrieked with laughter.
They soon located the ants’ nest, a large hole in the ground close to the roots of an acacia tree. Big soldier ants stood on guard there, and gently touched every ant that went in with their antennae, presumably to check its identity. They settled down at a distance, behind a spiky acacia, and watched the endless traffic. They were unaware that the shelter was unnecessary — that the soldier ants were blind, and the workers had poor eyesight. The ants were guided by an acute sense of smell, and were perfectly aware of the warm-blooded animals watching them from behind the spiny bush. But since food was abundant, and the creatures seemed to intend no harm, they had no reason to attack.
Hrolf eventually began to find the spectacle boring, and Niall found that the warmth of the sun made him sleepy, even though they were in the shade of the acacia. But Veig, who had the instincts of a born naturalist, watched everything with total absorption. It was Veig who recognised that the tree above them and the flowering bushes around were all an integral part of the ants’ nest. In the branches of the tree and in the roots of the bushes lived large green aphids, looking like fat grapes, which ate leaves and sap. Periodically, an ant would approach an aphid and stroke the bulbous abdomen with its antennae; then a large globule of a clear, sticky substance would emerge from the aphid’s anal cavity and be swallowed greedily by the ant, which might then make a second demand by stroking the aphid’s stomach. Veig tried it himself, gently stroking the stomach of an aphid that lay in the roots of a bush; at first, there was no response — his touch was maladroit — but eventually he achieved precisely the right quivering motion of the fingertips and the globule of sticky dew was extruded. Veig tasted it cautiously, frowned, then smacked his lips and tasted it again. Niall and Hrolf were finally persuaded to try the experiment and were agreeably surprised; it was sweet, syrupy, and in spite of a curious vegetable flavour, oddly satisfying to the stomach. As desert dwellers, they found nothing repellent in the notion of eating the product of a green fly’s digestive system. They had often eaten far less appetising things.
Hrolf said thoughtfully: “Pity we couldn’t take some of these bugs back home.”
“We’ve got them already. I’ve seen them.” There was no living creature within a mile of the burrow with whose habits Veig was not familiar.
Soon after, they witnessed another curious encounter. A big highwayman beetle, with its broad armoured back, blundered past them in the direction of the entrance to the nest. They expected to see it promptly attacked or driven away by the soldier ants. In fact, it approached a passing worker ant and advanced its face towards it as if inviting a kiss, at the same time tapping the ant with its short feelers. The ant stood still, and a small, glistening droplet passed from its mouth into the mouth of the beetle. A moment later, the ant seemed to recognise that it had been stopped on false pretences and furiously attacked the beetle. Two more passing ants came and joined in. The beetle seemed quite unalarmed; it simply turned on its back, raising its feet in the air as if dead. Two ants tried to bite its armoured belly with their mandibles, and another did its best to damage the indrawn head. After five minutes, they gave up and walked on. The beetle immediately struggled onto its legs, approached another worker ant, and repeated the procedure.
They understood what had happened when a worker ant emerging from the burrow approached a returning worker and stroked it with its antennae, at the same time raising its mouth. The workers had apparently been collecting nectar from flowers, which they seemed to store in the upper part of their bodies. If another ant wanted to eat, it approached the gatherer, indicated its need with its antennae and received a drop of regurgitated nectar. Hrolf and Niall had the utmost difficulty dissuading Veig from trying it; if the worker decided to attack, it would be useless for Veig to roll on his back and raise his legs in the air. Veig finally allowed himself to be persuaded, but nothing would draw him away from the ants’ nest. Their activities fascinated him, and he wanted to understand precisely how the ant society operated. Finally, Hrolf and Niall went off in disgust to look for food and to cool themselves in the stream. This was Niall’s idea of total happiness: to sit in the deepest place he could find, where the water flowed over his shoulders, and just relax and study the light reflected on the rippling surface. It not only soothed his bruised legs and his scratched hands; it also brought a strange sense of inner-control.
An hour before dark, two spider balloons drifted past slightly above the level of the treetops. By this time, all three of them were settled in their shelter under the rock, the entrance sealed with a double barrier of thorny bushes. They watched the balloons through small gaps in the branches, and Veig and Hrolf agreed that this must be a routine patrol; the movement of the balloons communicated no brooding sense of watchfulness.
As they lay in the dark, wrapped in their blankets of spider silk, on thick mattresses of pleasantly scented foxtail grass — which, unlike the esparto of the desert, was yielding and springy — Veig tried to argue them into staying there for another week. Hrolf might have been persuaded, but Niall was homesick; he was missing his mother and sister. Besides, his sixth sense told him that his brother was hatching some dangerous plan.
He proved correct. As they bathed in the stream the next morning, Veig revealed what he had in mind, and even Hrolf — who was usually willing to follow Veig’s lead — was incredulous.
“They’d eat you alive!”
“Only if I was stupid enough to let them.”
Veig’s scheme was to try to obtain some of the ant larvae — the unhatched babies — and rear them in the burrow as he had reared the pepsis wasp. To kidnap the larvae, he was willing to risk venturing into the ants’ nest. The secret of admittance, he believed, was to change his smell. Watching the ants throughout the previous day, he had at first concluded that they recognised one another by their sense of touch. The soldier ants felt the workers before admitting them into the nest — which also argued that the soldiers were blind. But he had then observed beetles and millipedes approaching the nest entrance, and the soldier ants had driven them off while they were still some distance away. They had also driven off some large brown ants, which obviously came from another nest. Even worker ants had unhesitatingly shown signs of mistrust of these strangers. This suggested that ants distinguished friends from strangers through their sense of smell, and also seemed to explain why certain creatures — like the highwayman beetle — could persuade ants to disgorge food from their crops. They had somehow succeeded in counterfeiting the ant smell.
Niall asked: “And how do you intend to make youself smell like an ant?”
“That stuff they use to mark their trail — it’s a kind of oil.”
“But if it doesn’t work, they’ll kill you. You saw how three of them attacked that beetle.”
Veig, who was a man of few words, said stubbornly: “I’m going to try, anyway.”
Hrolf and Niall waited at a distance, while Veig concealed himself behind a bush at the side of the ant trail. When a passing ant exuded its drop of oily substance, Veig darted forward, snatched it up and rubbed it on his skin. In half an hour, his body was covered with a mixture of oil, sand and dust; he even rubbed it into his hair. A black ant approached along the trail, and Veig walked unhesitatingly towards it. Niall had to admire his brother’s courage; although the ant was smaller than a man, it looked formidable with its long, spidery legs and powerful mandibles. The ant did not even pause; it simply walked round the human being that blocked its path, and continued without change of pace.