A Hunter of the Grass-Tops

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

AT forty minutes past two in the afternoon I am lying in the shade, on “ Lotus Island,” — the island of us lotus-eaters, who come to this part of the meadows in order to forget everything but the pleasures which the fields supply. Not that it is really an island, — more reason yet for the name we give. True, on one side it is bordered by a veritable river ; but that other arc of the watery circle which would make this a real island is no more than the ghost of a stream which we can easily imagine flowing in a now deserted channel. This old bed, higher than the level of the water in the present river, has its sedgy, frog - haunted pools, which were the old stream’s eddy-basins ; and a row of alders and shrubby trees still impends above the empty bed. Completing the arboreal screen about this retreat, there grows along the present stream’s margin, with here an elm and there a maple, the new fringing tangle of willows and alders.

Near my feet, on a spire of grass, is one of those small, dark-colored jumping spiders. He is one fourth of an inch in length. Hop ! He is a lively little fellow. Without an effort, and with the directness of a stone from a catapult, he springs nine times his own length, two and a quarter inches, horizontally, to the next spire. Before he goes again I have a good look at his build and marks. His small abdomen is fox-colored, with six or eight dark-brown spots. The head and chest part, which is very large and strong in proportion to the abdomen, is glossy black, beautifully patterned with old gold, while the mouth parts and legs are dappled gray. The legs, designed for leaping, are short and powerful.

He walks a few steps up the grass blade, and, with another of his sudden springs, shoots, or snaps like a snapping seed, to another spire. I now notice a new fact of spider life : for an instant, as a breath of air stirs, a thread of light spans the lastcrossed chasm, straight from the spider to his previous resting-place. It is plain that he traces the course of his wanderings by a web, a sort of clue to the grassy labyrinth ; though for what purpose I cannot understand.

Now he displays his skill as a tumbler, for in leaping from one grass stem to another he turns a somersault, and alights head downward. That certainly puts to shame your ordinary floor - tumbling gymnasts. Then he travels onward for a minute or two, with little rest, making about two inches at a leap. Once he shows another feat of mid-air gymnastics. He sees, six inches lower and nearly beneath him, the horizontally spreading leaf of a little herb, towards which he leaps. But he alights on the under side of the leaf. Apparently this is impossible, yet I happen to perceive how it is accomplished. He aims to clear the leaf’s edge by ever so little ; then, at the moment of passing, strikes out all the sharp-hooked feet of one side, catches the leaf, thus arresting his fall, and swings himself to the under side. Imagine the attempt of the best human gymnast to perform the same feat, with proportionally one tenth the downward leap which the spider makes, and you realize something of the structural superiority of this little being over mankind.

Several times I observe the gleaming thread carefully attached before each jump. It serves no manifest purpose, such as that of fly-catching or of a bridge. Before leaping, the little fellow prettily raises his bands. or fore legs, evidently in the act of taking aim. He springs for a definite mark, and is remarkably sure of his aim, —a fact which, it may incidentally be pointed out, proves that for distances of several inches the vision of limiting spiders is perfectly distinct and clear.

Alas ! At the very instant I brag about him to my friends he misses entirely, and falls—no, he does not fall to the ground, but swings on that little, well-fastened web back to the stalk from which he jumped. I see now the purpose of that fine thread, the clue to the maze, of which he always carries one end. It is a kind of fire-escape, to be used in case he does not make the target aimed for. And the failure to reach footing this time is rather the fault of the slender yielding grass-stalk whence he sprung.

It is now five minutes before three o’clock. In the last fifteen minutes he has traveled five feet from the place where I first saw him. He has rested briefly here and there, looking about for prey, and twice has made an unsuccessful attempt to strike down a very small individual of the fly kind, which had alighted on an ear grass leaf. Each time the winged atom has flown at the instant of the hunter’s springing. These flying mites, of a delicate green tint, hundreds of which would weigh scarcely a single grain, have upon their heads tufts of finest hairs, which in the sunlight appear like queerly fashioned halos. The sunbeams easily pass through these little insects, while a breath blows them with resistless force. There are thousands of them flying in and above the grass ; and all these thousands, like scholastic angels, could dance upon a pin-point. At rest on the herbage they are nearly invisible to my coarse eyes.

The hunter has now given up the plan of flushing his game. As he sits upon the stub of a very young tree, untimely cut off by last year’s scythes, he looks not unlike a lion in waiting for his prey ; or, let us say, like Satan casting his baleful eyes about him. Smaller than that hero as he is described in Paradise Lost, indeed ; but on this island all things flow, and the stream, flowing backward, turns great to small, and small to great.

A beetle, one sixteenth of an inch long, perhaps, come lumbering up the stalk of a dwarfish herb. As he gains the roof of a leaf, he comes into Satan’s ken. The latter turns about, to eye him ; but beetles seem not to his taste, and he resumes his former position. An “angel,” alighting on a grass blade about eight inches from the spider, attracts my eye ; I wonder if hunger has sufficiently sharpened Satan’s ? Yes, he is off, and making nearly the whole distance in three leaps is within an inch and a half of the angel ; he raises his hands for the leap, and—but the angel, discerning its enemy’s motions, perhaps, now takes flight. The spider comes back to the stub. Another minute, and be suddenly springs downward, alighting on the under side of a procumbent grass leaf, and immediately returns, successful ; for in his massive jaws, feebly struggling, is an angel. His victim clasped to his breast in malign embrace, he settles to his orgies. For a time the unfortunate’s antennæ feebly wave. In six minutes I can see no trace, not even the shell of the body, of the angel. Then for seven minutes afterward the satisfied monster does not stir. The beetle, or a twin brother, upward bound for the summit of the stub, crawls by without disturbing his huge content.