The women were in some doubt about eating a bird that had been paralysed with wasp poison, and left it untouched for a while. It was also the first bird they had seen at such close quarters, and they were not sure how to deal with its feathers. Finally, hunger overcame their misgivings; and after Veig had roasted and eaten a slice of the breast without ill effect, the rest was devoured until only the feet remained. The nerve poison — quite harmless when taken orally — had tenderised the flesh, and the result was delicious. From then on, roast bustard was included with running water and coloured flowers in Mall’s idea of paradise.
Ever since Niall had learned to walk, he had been trained to keep watch for spider balloons. Before he ventured out of the cave at the foot of the plateau, he had to wet his finger and decide the direction of the wind. Then he had to scan the horizon for anything that seemed to reflect the sunlight. Until he was convinced that the sky was completely clear, he had to stay in the cave.
If he saw a balloon heading in his direction, his instructions were to bury himself in the sand — if there was time — or otherwise to remain perfectly still. He was not to follow the progress of the balloon with his eyes, but was to look down at the sand and concentrate on whatever he was looking at. The death spiders, Ulf explained, had poor eyesight, so would probably not see him. They hunted by will, not by the sense of sight, and they could smell fear. This puzzled Niall, who could not understand how fear could have a smell. Ulf explained that fear produced a vibration which was exactly like a scream of terror, and the spider’s senses were attuned to this vibration. So if the spider balloons passed overhead, it was necessary to make the mind as silent and as still as the body. To give way to fear would be exactly like jumping up and down and shouting to attract the spider’s attention.
Being a cheerful and confident child, Niall had no doubt this would be easy. All he had to do was to empty his mind and tell himself there was nothing to be afraid of. But at night this confidence evaporated. If he lay awake listening to the silence, he often became convinced that he could hear something creeping through the sand outside. Soon his imagination had conjured up a giant spider, trying to peer over the rock that blocked the doorway. Then his heart began to beat faster, and he became aware that he was sending off signals of panic. The harder he tried to suppress them, the more persistent they became. He felt he was caught in a vicious circle, his fear increasing his fear. But eventually, because he was young and self-confident, he learned to counteract the fear before it could send the adrenalin flooding into his bloodstream, and to command his heart to beat more slowly.
His mother was the only one in the family who would talk about the spiders. Later, he understood the reason. The menfolk were afraid that Niall’s imagination might become obsessed by the creatures and that his fear might betray them all when the balloons came too close. His mother recognised that fear of the unknown might produce precisely the same effect; so when they were alone, she answered his questions freely. But he knew instinctively that she was only telling him half the truth. When he asked her why the spiders wanted to capture human beings, she said it was because they wanted to enslave them. When he asked her if they ate human beings, she denied it, and pointed out that Jomar had escaped unharmed. But when he questioned Jomar about the spiders, the old man always pretended to be sleepy or deaf. The few things Niall learned about them were picked up from fragments of whispered conversation, overheard when he was supposed to be asleep. And these left him in no doubt that the spiders were not only carnivorous but horribly cruel.
Fortunately, the spider balloons seemed to avoid the desert — either because the heat was too great, or because they believed that no human beings could survive in such conditions. Before they moved from the cave to the burrow, Niall had seen only a dozen balloons, and these were on the horizon.
It was different on the edge of the desert; here the spiders kept up regular patrols, usually at dawn or dusk. They were obviously routine patrols, but disturbing all the same. It was as if the spiders knew that, sooner or later, the humans would be tempted out of the desert to these less arid regions with their abundance of cactus fruit and small animals and locusts. One day, when a spider balloon had passed almost directly overhead, they had seriously discussed returning to the safety of the desert. Ulf and Siris were willing, even though Siris was pregnant again; but Ingeld flatly declined even to consider the idea. She said that she would rather be dead than go bacll to the cave and a diet of prickly pears. Niall was secretly relieved at her refusal; he also preferred food and danger to starvation and boredom.
When his sister Runa was born, Niall ceased to be the baby of the family. He was nearly eleven years old and began to accompany the men on their hunting expeditions. At first he found it exhausting, walking sometimes twenty miles in the heat of the day, his eyes constantly alert for spider balloons or for the telltale signs of the lair of a trapdoor spider or yellow desert scorpion. The men soon realised that his sense of danger was keener than their own. One day, approaching a grove of thorny desert trees where they had set bird snares, Niall experienced a feeling of reluctance, as if some force were trying to pull him backwards. He laid his hand on Hrolf’s arm, and his sense of danger communicated itself to the others, who stopped and stared intently at the trees. After perhaps ten minutes, Ulf saw a slight movement, and they; all glimpsed the long, thin leg of a cricket. Ulf said: “It’s only a decta,” — a name for the harmless desert cricket. But Niall’s sense of danger remained persistent, and he refused to move. The men finally decided to give the trees a wide berth and struck out across the rock-strewn wilderness towards a clump of fruit-bearing cacti.
On their way back, towards dusk, they again passed within a few hundred yards of the trees. They were moving very quietly, and startled a desert cricket, which frightened them all by suddenly bounding into the air and vanishing with twenty-foot leaps towards the trees. Then, suddenly, there was a blurred cloud and the decta was struggling in the grip of a nightmare creature that towered into the air above it. It was like a very large cricket, perhaps eight feet tall, but its grey-green legs were covered with spikes or bristles. The strange-looking head resembled a long, blank face, surmounted by two spherical eyes; at the lower end of this face were long, pointed jaws, not unlike the claws of a scorpion. As they watched, it pressed the cricket tight against its bosom, lifting the cricket’s hind legs clear of the ground, so that they kicked in space. Then, with a single slash of the armoured jaws, it ripped open the cricket’s throat. They were so horrified at the demonic apparition that they stood and stared. The creature paid no attention to them, but chewed its way into the cricket’s head, which collapsed at an unnatural angle. The goggle eyes of the demon seemed to stare unconcernedly over the desert as it crunched its way down its victim’s body. When it had almost finished eating, the hunters realised that it might still be hungry; it would be expedient to remove themselves from its vicinity. Badly shaken, they hurried back towards the burrow.
Jomar, who had remained behind that day — his leg was becoming increasingly stiff — recognised their description of the creature, although he had never seen one. It was a particularly savage member of the cricket family sometimes called a saga insect. Its armour made it practically invulnerable, and its long legs meant that it could leap on a prey from a distance of a hundred yards. If the hunters had approached any closer to the trees, one of them would undoubtedly have been eaten as voraciously as the desert cricket was.
After that experience, the men came to accept that Niall’s intuition of danger was keener than their own; he became a valuable regular member of the hunting party.
Ulf and Thorg were skilled hunters; but for them, hunting was simply a necessity; when the larder was full, they preferred to rest in the cool depths of the cave, lighted by a flickering oil lamp, and talking in low voices. Veig and Hrolf, being younger, regarded hunting as a sport and an adventure. If this rocky wilderness was like a paradise compared to the desert, then perhaps the lands to the north contained an even wider variety of game. Ulf warned them that the north was also the region of the death spiders. But Jomar had told them that a wide sea lay between this land and the country of the spiders. He had also told them about the great delta that lay to the north-east, a vast green area of forest and lush vegetation. Other hunters had told them about the delta, with its flesh-eating plants; but Veig and Hrolf had the confidence of youth, and did not doubt that even a man-eating plant would be less dangerous than a tiger beetle or giant scorpion. One day, in the cool season, they would cross the wilderness to the great delta. Meanwhile, the land to the north offered promise of adventure.