Beneath the oaks which she was exploiting in June, I succeed in finding, among the dead leaves, [[153]]a dozen of her little barrels. They have retained their green colour, so suddenly did the desiccation seize them. They crack and crumble into dust under the pressure of the fingers.
I open a barrel. In the middle is the grub, looking fit enough, but how small! It is hardly larger than when it left the egg. Is it dead or alive, this yellow atom? Its immobility proclaims it to be dead; its unfaded colour proclaims it to be alive. I break open a second barrel, a third. In the middle there is always a yellow grub, motionless and quite small, as though newly-born. We will stop at this and keep the rest of my collection for an experiment that occurs to my mind.
With their mummy-like immobility, are the grubs really dead? No; for, if I prick them with the point of a needle, they twitch immediately. Their condition is merely one of arrested development. In their freshly-rolled sheath, still hanging from the tree and receiving a little sap, they found the food necessary for their early growth; then the barrel fell to the ground, where it soon dried up.
Then, disdaining its hard provender, the grub ceased to eat and grow. Who sleeps dines, so the proverb says; and it is waiting in a state of torpor for the rain to soften its bread.
This rain, for which man and beast have been sighing for four months past, I have it in my power [[154]]to realize, at least to the limits of a Weevil’s requirements. I float the rest of the dry barrels in water. When they are thoroughly soaked, I transfer them into a glass tube, closed at either end with a plug of wet cotton-wool which will keep the atmosphere moist.
The result of my stratagems deserves mention. The sleepers awake, eat the inside of the softened loaf, and make up so well for lost time that in a few weeks they are as large as those which have not suffered any interruption in my jars half full of moist earth.
This knack of suspending life for months at a time, when the provisions have lost the requisite tenderness, is not repeated in the other leaf-rollers. At the end of August, three months after the hatching, there is nothing left alive in the cigars of the vine which have been allowed to dry. Death is even swifter in the withered cigars of the poplar. As for the cylinders of the alder, in the absence of a sufficient number of leaves, I was not able to estimate their inhabitants’ powers of endurance.
Of the four leaf-rollers, the one most threatened by drought is that of the oak. Her barrel falls and lies on a soil which is extremely arid except at times of rain; moreover, because of its small dimensions, it dries right through at the first touch of the sun.
The ground is equally dry in the vineyard; but there is shade under the branches, and the [[155]]generous cigar is thick enough to retain in its central part, far better than the slender barrel does, a little of the moisture indispensable to the grub. In respect of prolonged abstinence, the Vine-weevil cannot be compared with the barrel-maker; still less can the Poplar-weevil. For this last, more often than otherwise, there is no danger from drought, despite the smallness of the cylinder, a sorry rat’s-tail. This roll usually falls by the side of a ditch, on the moist soil of the meadows. The exploiter of the alder is hardly in danger either: at the foot of her tree, a lover of the trickling brooks, she finds the coolness needed to keep her food-cylinder in good condition. But, when she exploits the hazel-bush, I do not know what conditions help her out of her difficulty.
Lately the newspapers, which noisily echo every piece of absurdity, have been making a certain fuss about the gastric feats of a few poor devils who, to earn their bread, have fasted for thirty or forty days. As in most stunts, admirers were found, ready to encourage those wretched competitions.