The Truro Bear and Other Adventures Read Online Free

backward, is instantly enfolded into darkness and gone from sight.
    It is five A.M.
    Good fortune has struck the web like an avalanche. A cricket—not the black, flat-bodied, northern sort I am used to, but a paler variety, with a humped, shrimp-like body and whip-like antennae and jumper’s legs—has become enmeshed in the web.
    This spider is not an orb weaver; that is, she does not build a net silken and organized and centered along a few strong cables. No, her web is a poor thing. It is flung forth, ungloriously, only a few inches above the cellar floor. What is visible is in a wild disorder. Nevertheless, it functions; it holds, now, the six egg cases and the cricket, which struggles in a sort of sling of webbing.
    The spider now is never still. She descends to the cricket again and again, then hastens away and hangs a short distance above. Though it is almost impossible to see, a fine line follows her, jetting from her spinneret; as she moves, she is wrapping the cricket. Soon the threads thicken; the cricket is bound with visible threads at the ankles, which keep it from tearing loose with the strength of the huge back legs. How does the spider know what it knows? Little by little the cricket’s long front limbs with their serrated edges, flung in an outward gesture from its body, are also being wrapped. Soon the cricket’s efforts to free itself are only occasional—a few yawings toward push or pull—then it is motionless.
    All this has taken an hour.
    There has been nothing consumable in the web for more than a week, during which time the spider has made her sixth egg case and, presumably, before that, carried through some motions of romance with her consort, and produced the actual eggs. Her body during this week—I mean that dust-colored, sofa-button, bulbous part of her body so visible to our eyes—has shrunk to half its previous size.
    Then, as I continued to watch, the spider began a curious and coordinated effort. She dropped to the cricket and with her foremost limbs, which are her longest, she touched its body. The response was an immediate lurching of cricket, also spider and web. Swiftly she turned—she was, in fact, beginning the motions of turning even as she reached forward and then, even before the cricket reacted, with her hindmost pair of limbs she
kicked
it. She did this over and over—descending, touching and turning, kicking—each of her kicks targeting the cricket’s stretched-out back limbs. She did this perhaps twenty times. With every blow the cricket swung, then rocked back to motionlessness, the only signs of life a small, continual motion of the jointed mouth, and a faint bubbling therefrom.
    As I watched, the spider wrapped its thread again around the cricket’s ankles. Then, with terrible and exact precision, she moved toward an indentation of flesh just at the elbow joint of the cricket’s left front limb—and to this soft place she dipped her mouth. But, yet again, at this touch, the cricket lurched. So she retreated, and waited, and then again, with an undivertable aim, descended to that elbow where, finally, with no reaction from the cricket, she was able for perhaps three minutes to place her small face. There, as I imagine it, she began to infuse her flesh-dissolving venom into the channels of the cricket’s body. Intermittently the cricket still moved, so this procedure even yet required some stopping and restarting, but it was clearly an unretractable operation. At length, in twenty minutes perhaps, the cricket lay utterly quiescent; and then the spider moved, with the most gentle and certain of motions, to the cricket’s head, its bronze, visor-like face, and there, again surely and with no hesitation, the spider positioned her body, her mouth once more at some chosen juncture, near throat, the spinal cord, the brain.
    Now she might have been asleep as she lay, lover-like, alongside the cricket’s body. Later—hours later—she moved down along its bronze chest,