The excitement made Niall drowsy, and he fell asleep with his head in his mother’s lap. Later, his grandfather lifted him quietly and carried him to his bed, which was in a corner next to his own. Niall woke up as he was being covered with the caterpillar skin; although it was dark, he could distinguish his grandfather by his distinctive smell.
“Why did the wasp lay its egg on the spider’s belly?” he asked sleepily.
“So the grub will have something to eat.”
“But won’t the spider be rotten by the time the egg hatches out?”
“Of course not. It’s not dead.”
Niall’s eyes widened in the dark. He had not mentioned his suspicion that the spider was still alive, for fear of ridicule. “How do you know it’s not dead?”
“Wasps don’t kill spiders. They want them alive, to feed their young. Now go to sleep.”
But Niall was now wide awake. He lay there in the dark for a long time, experiencing again that strange mixture of revulsion and pity; but this time pity was predominant.
Early the next morning, they all went to look at the paralysed tarantula. Niall was surprised to see that the trapdoor was now shut. With the point of his spear, Jomar levered it open — Niall noticed that, in spite of his confident assertion, he did it with extreme caution. Peering over his shoulder — his mother was holding him — Niall was startled to see that the spider was no longer there. Then he saw that it had been dragged into the bend of the tunnel. The wasp had evidently returned and moved it, then closed the trapdoor — a considerable feat for a creature only six inches long. The women shuddered, and Ingeld said she was going to be sick. But Niall observed that his brother Veig became oddly quiet and thoughtful.
Veig had always been fascinated by insects. Once, as a child, he had vanished from the cave one afternoon when his mother was asleep; she had found him a quarter of a mile away, studying a nest of scarab beetles. On another occasion, the men had returned from their hunting with several live cicadas, each more than a foot long; and although they were half-starved, Veig had begged with tears in his eyes to be allowed to keep one as a pet. (He had been overruled, and the cicada had been roasted for supper.)
So Niall was not surprised, two days later, to see his brother slipping off quietly in the direction of the spider’s nest. He waited until Veig was out of sight, then followed him. Niall assumed that his brother wanted to take a closer look at the tarantula, and he was right. From the shelter of the cactus he watched Veig lever open the trapdoor, then lie flat on his stomach to peer into the nest. A few seconds later, Veig lowered himself cautiously over the edge. Niall ran quietly across the sand, approaching from an angle from which his shadow would not betray him. Veig was crouched two feet below him, staring with total absorption; when Niall betrayed his presence by a slight movement, he leapt to his feet, already raising his spear. He sighed with relief when he saw it was his brother.
“Idiot! You frightened me!”
“Sorry. What are you doing?”
Veig simply pointed to the spider. By leaning over the edge, Niall could see that the egg had burst open and that a large black grub now wriggled on the spider’s upturned stomach, its tiny legs too feeble to allow it to move. But when Veig gently poked it with his finger, its powerful little mandibles instantly gripped the skin of the spider’s belly; for if it rolled off, it would die of starvation. When Veig caressed it, the larva twisted and tried to retaliate with its tiny, undeveloped sting. But Veig persisted; and half an hour later, the grub accepted the light caresses as a matter of course. It was more interested in trying to penetrate the thick, hairy skin of the belly. For two hours they watched it, until the heat of the sun drove them back to the burrow. By that time, it had already gnawed a hole in the skin, and Niall felt no inclination to see more. As they left, Veig carefully closed the trapdoor behind him.
“What would you do if the wasp came back while you were in there?” Niall asked.
“It won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.” Veig never said much, but he seemed to know things by intuition.
For the next few weeks, Veig spent at least an hour every day in the nest of the trapdoor spider. Niall went with him only once; the sight of the red cavity in the tarantula’s belly disgusted him, and he no longer took pleasure in the downfall of his enemy. He found it impossible to understand how Veig could patiently cut tiny slivers of flesh from the spider and feed them to the voracious grub. Soon Veig found it necessary to close the trapdoor, leaving it propped open an inch or so with a stone; otherwise black desert flies were quickly attracted by the exposed entrails. These flies were slightly smaller than the common house fly, being only about three inches long, but the blood-sucking proboscis and sharp mandibles made them capable of destroying an exposed carcass within hours.
One day, Veig came back to the burrow with the wasp on his wrist. It was now almost fully grown, and with its metallic blue body, yellow wings and long, graceful legs, looked at once beautiful and dangerous. Yet it clearly regarded Veig with total trust; it was astonishing to watch Veig turn it on its back and prod it with his forefinger, while the wasp wrapped its long legs round his hand, nibbled at his finger with its sharp mandibles, and occasionally allowed the long, black sting to slide out like a dagger. It also liked to climb up Veig’s arm and hide itself in his shoulder-length hair; then, with its feelers it would investigate the lobe of his ear until he laughed hysterically.
The next morning, Niall was allowed to accompany Veig and Ulf as they took the wasp hunting for the first time. They walked to the acacias that Niall had seen on the horizon when they first came to the burrow. There they soon found what they were looking for: the webs of the grey desert spider. These creatures were smaller than the tarantula, their bodies scarcely more than a foot long; but the legs, by comparison, were enormous. Trussed up in the corner of one of these webs was a grasshopper, helpless in its cocoon of silk. Veig moved around underneath the tree until he saw the spider, concealed in a fork where a branch joined the main trunk. He threw a stone; the first one bounced off the trunk; the second struck the spider. In a flash, it had lowered itself to the ground on a thread of silk. Just as quickly, the wasp was humming towards it, like a hawk descending on its prey. The spider had no time to square up to its antagonist; the wasp was underneath it, gripping its back leg and arching its body upward. They all saw the sting penetrate, and watched the metallic body quiver slightly as it injected its nerve poison. The spider struggled and tried to wrap its legs round the wasp; but its instinct provided it with no defence. A few minutes later, it lay on the ground, limp as a discarded toy. And the wasp, now it had obeyed its instinct, was also uncertain what to do next; it crawled over the fleshy grey body and seemed to be sniffing it. Veig went and knelt gently beside it, reached out very slowly and moved the wasp onto his wrist. Then, from a bag suspended from his waist, he took a fragment of tarantula flesh and fed it to the wasp. After that, they chopped off the spider’s legs, to make it easier to carry, and Ulf dropped it into his own basket. It provided the wasp with meals for the next month.
Ingeld, typically, regarded the wasp with dislike and mistrust, and screamed if it came near her. (It proved to be a friendly creature that liked to walk up and down their bare arms.) She also protested that the dead spider had an unpleasant smell. There was some truth in this; spiders had their own distinct and peculiar smell, which increased after death. But they kept the spider-meat in the remotest depth of the burrow, covered with a thick layer of grass, so the smell scarcely penetrated to the living quarters; in any case, human beings who live in close proximity, with little opportunity for washing, soon become accustomed to a variety of natural odours. Niall sensed intuitively that Ingeld’s objections arose out of a desire to get herself noticed, and he was amused to observe how quickly her attitude changed when Veig returned a few days later with a bird that the wasp had attacked on the wing. It was a member of the bustard family, about the size of a large duck. Veig described how he had seen it perched in the top of a tree and directed the wasp towards it. (The wasp seemed to respond directly to Veig’s mental commands.) Alarmed by the hum, the bird began to fly away, then pecked frantically as the wasp fastened onto its leg and drove in its sting. Veig had to walk two miles to locate them; the wasp was sitting quietly on the back of the bird, which lay with outstretched wings as if it had crashed from a height. Veig gave the wasp its reward of spider-meat, then killed the bustard with a twist of his muscular hands.