Page:Princess Mary's Gift Book.djvu/50

32 like the Crab, he can only really walk backwards, which is not exactly the way to overtake your quarry when it’s in front of you.

To be fat and heavy, to walk backwards and to be obliged to have live Ant for one’s dinner is a difficult, a very difficult problem. What would you do in such a case? Come, try to find something! Rack your brains! You can think of nothing? Well, never mind: plenty of others, including myself, could not think of anything either.

Everyday common-sense, expressed in proverbs, tells us over and over again that necessity is the mother of invention. This great truth, which we have learnt by personal experience, we shall learn once more from the Ant-hunter. But first let us give him a name, to simplify our story. Naturalists call him the Ant-lion, a very happy term, which reminds us that, like the Lion, he lives by carnage, slaughtering live prey, in this ease Ants. Now that we have christened him we can on.

When he wants his dinner, the Ant-lion says to himself:

“You’re a fat little beggar, you know, short-legged and slow-moving; you’ll never catch Ants by running after them. On the other hand, you can walk backwards, that’s capital; you have a head flattened like a navvy’s shovel, that’s first-rate; your pincers are long and grip like a knife, that’s perfect, absolutely perfect. We’ll use that talent for walking backwards; we’ll use those tools, the shovel and tongs; we’ll make craft take the place of the agility which we lack; and the dinner will come along.”

No sooner said than done. In a nice dry spot, warmed by the sun and sheltered from the rain by an overhanging rock, the wily animal selects a place where Ants are incessantly moving to and fro on household matters. Gravely, with the mathematical accuracy of an engineer tracing the foundation of a well-planned building, the Ant-lion walks backwards, with his body dug into the sand; he turns and turns and in this way hollows out a groove shaped like a perfect circle. Then, still moving backwards and still digging deeper and deeper into the sand, he repeats the circuit many times over, but gradually coming nearer the centre, where he arrives in the end. If any obstacle, such as a large bit of gravel, which would spoil the work, makes its appearance, the Ant-lion takes it on his flat head and, with a vigorous jerk of his neck, flings it to a distance over the edge of the hole. We should use a shovel in exactly the same way to throw out the rubbish when digging.