What Is The Sound
Of One Ant Screaming?
Like this afternoon, for example.
I had taken advantage of our unusually balmy weather to visit my favorite ship-watching spot. I like to do that, occasionally -- drive down to the absolute, final, east end of the Seawall, take the mental needle out of the groove for an hour or so (Hmpf. Guess THAT dates me!), and watch the ships go by in the Bolivar Roads..
It was a pleasant enough afternoon -- the sun playing hide-and-seek through a scurrying sea-breeze scud, the green wavelets lazily slap-sucking at the rocks below, a brisk, salt-tanged breeze carrying inland the restless grumble of the surf down on East Beach.
Out of the corner of my eye, the tiniest flicker of movement drew my attention. Three or four ants were milling about an expansion joint in the concrete curbing a couple of feet away, and one of them broke away from the group and headed my way.
I watched him for a minute, as he drew nearer -- and then it happened. I did a bad, mean, little, thing.
I reached out with my thumb and squashed him. Just like that, with no malice aforethought, no premeditation, certainly no provocation. It was a mindless act, as casual a thing as stubbing out a cigarette butt, just ''hey, there's an ant -- SQUASH!'' A small, petty thing to do, but I did it.
Something immediately drew my eye to the expansion joint the little guy had crawled out of. It was suddenly alive with ants -- five, then 10, then 15 -- boiling out as surely as if I had kicked their anthill open.
They knew! Their lair was at least an ant mile away from the scene of the crime, yet, as soon as it had happened, they knew!
How did they know? A chill ran up my spine. My God, had he screamed? It never occurred to me that an ant might be capable of a last anguished cry; I had always thought of ants as brainless, unfeeling automatons. They didn't really die when you squashed them, I imagined, they just sparked and sputtered like a shorted-out toaster.
But these ants now pouring from the crack were disconcertingly upset over the death of their colleague. I got the creepy feeling that the last transmission from his twitching antennae hadn't been a robotic ''Attention, major malfunction in supply unit 624, send replacement;'' no, it had been a bloodcurdling ''Mommmeeee!''
As the ants scampered about, waving their antennae in wild, frantic circles over their heads, an image suddenly flashed to my mind of the wailing, chanting, head-pounding, garment-rending hordes of inconsolable mourners at one of those West Bank funerals you see on the 5:30 news.
That's silly, I told myself, ants don't grieve. You're just feeling guilty. Your conscience is reading all kinds of anthropomorphic nonsense into the creatures' purely instinctive behavior.'
Still, there was one who ... no, c'mon, get off it, an ant's not a ''who,'' it's just a ''what'' ... anyway, one of them was circling the crumpled little corpse, tenderly touching it with her ... its .. antennae; was this the wife, or the mother?
Oh, great, I thought. Now I have them getting married, having kids, telling bedtime stories, going on family picnics in the country. Boy, you couple an overactive imagination with a guilty conscience...
Fortunately, my mind was snapped back to the here and now, as I watched the milling swarm and noticed they were getting closer -- they weren't mourning, they were coming after me! I didn't need any imagination to tell me they had their stingers primed and ready for action; one of their number had been killed and their instincts dictated they seek out the threat and eliminate it.
Time to beat a hasty retreat, I decided, with a sigh.
And I hadn't seen a single ship.
Like I said, amazing, how quickly a good day can go sour.
