ANTS
Ants
THAT was a monster of an ant-hill. It was the largest, by far the largest, I ever saw in this country, and the floor of the forest all around was twinkling with these priggish insects. Anxious to have some idea of its true size and anxious, at the same time, not to have any of the nuisances crawling up my own legs, I made Mr. R. pace its circumference. It took him sixteen good strides. And there they were, myriads upon myriads of them, hiving up for their own selfish purpose those dried fir-needles which, left alone, would have yielded a rich soil to future generations of men.
I have no use for ants, and cannot regard an ant-heap without yearning to stamp it flat (those made of earth are not difficult to treat in this fashion); without regretting that I lack the tongue and tastes of an anteater. And only in the tropics do you realize what a diabolical pest they may become with their orderly habits; European ants being mere amateurs in obnoxiousness. To do everything you are supposed to do, and nothing else at all; never to make a mistake, or, if you do, to be invariably punished for it in exact proportion to the offense: can there be a more contemptible state of affairs? That is why, even as a boy, I used to foster the independent little fellows called myrmeleon (ant-lion) who built their artful, funnel-shaped traps in the dry sand out of reach of showers, just where our house-walls touched the ground; foster them, and visit them periodically, and feed them with these insufferable communists till they were ready to burst. But oh, to be an authentic anteater on a Gargantuan scale—omnipresent, insatiable of appetite—and engulf that entire tribe of automata!
One of my countless grievances against the ant family is that a clever person, long ago, told me that, in order to have the flesh properly removed from the skull of any bird or beast, you have only to lay it in an ant-hill; the insects would do the job to a turn and thank you, into the bargain, for allowing them to do it; work of this kind, he declared, was quite a specialty of their department. Accordingly, I once deposited an extremely valuable relic in the center of a prosperous ant-colony, expecting to find it ready for me, picked clean, after a due lapse of time. On arriving to call for my property, however, a fortnight or so later, I was surprised to find it gone; the methodical socialists had mislaid it, and I never saw it again. One took such losses to heart in those days. I therefore went all the way home once more, determined to get my own job done more conscientiously than theirs, and fetched a rake wherewith this slovenly establishment was leveled to the ground. But oh, for a rake that would rake every ant-hill off the face of the earth!
That happened in my bird-killing period, when I used to get up at the improbable hour of 3:30 a.m. and, putting in my Rucksack some bread and smoked bacon-fat and a flask of Kirsch, vanish into the wilds, returning home any time after nightfall or not at all: judge if I saw some ant-hills! So I roved about, and the first thing I ever murdered, an hour after receiving that single-barreled gun, was a melancholy brown owl that blinked at me from its perch below the Bährenloch at Bludenz; the slaughter of this charming bird was taken as a good omen. Soon came other guns, and other birds, not all of which shared the fate of the owl. Never shall I forget a certain pratincole. It was the only one I have yet seen in this province, a great rarity, and it settled down for a whole summer season in the reservoir region along the upper Montiola brook, where it relied upon its disconcerting flight and a trick of rising from the ground at the one and only spot where you could not possibly expect it to do so, to mock all my attempts at bringing it down. I was after it so often that we got to know each other perfectly well, and never bagged it; thereby proving the truth of the local proverb “Every day is hunting day, but not every day is catching day.” Queer experiences one had, too. At the age of fourteen I was once resting on my homeward way in the woods near Gasünd, dead tired but uncommonly pleased with myself for having just shot a hazel grouse—again, the only one I ever saw in the province. There came one of those flocks of titmice—is not titmouses the correct English?—accompanied, no doubt, by the inevitable tree-creeper. They amused themselves in the branches overhead and one of them soon struck me as unfamiliar; its size and shape and movements were those of a great tit, but there were unmistakable red feathers on the head and neck. I watched it hopping from twig to twig, annoyed to think that I had shot away my last cartridge, and wondering what this rare mountain bird could be, for I never doubted of its actuality; there it was, before my eyes! Only later did I learn that no such bird exists. Now had the vision been brought about by my state of bodily exhaustion? And was the dream-bird created out of one of those present, or out of nothing at all? Illusion, or hallucination?
Presently certain regions became famous for certain game; in that larch wood between Bürs and Bürserberg, for instance, which takes on such wonderful tints in autumn and which you can enter through a natural arch called the “Kuhloch,” you might count on crossbills and on a woodpecker of one kind or another (never on the scarce black one; it haunts the gloomiest forests). Of the lesser spotted species I shot two off the same tree at an interval of almost exactly a year—30 December in one year, and 28 December the next; a circumstance all the more singular, as I never in my life met with another individual of this bird in the whole country. Or, if you wanted a great gray shrike, you had only to go, preferably in winter, to the Scesa-tobel, that devastated tract west of Bürs which was just then beginning to cover itself with vegetation once more. Here you might also put up a hare; it was in the Scesa-tobel, by the purest of accidents, that I once shot a hare in full gallop at a distance of a hundred yards—a mere speck, he was—with a bullet. I confessed afterwards to Mattli, who was beating another part of this torrent, that I had missed him at close quarters with the shot barrel, and soon regretted having made this confession; there are things one might well keep to oneself.
Mattli, whatever his real name may have been, was often with me on such excursions, and I know not how he managed to combine these trips with his official duties as station-master; for station-master he was, at our own station, which was then called Strassenhaus. To be sure, one could take things easier in those days (the building itself was less than half its present size); so easy, that the man who was employed to guard the line a quarter of a mile lower down, used to put up, for several consecutive years, a dummy figure of himself standing upright beside his cabin in the wood, in order to make the night-train people think he was at his post, while he went to booze in a tavern at Ludesch. Yet Mattli’s weakness must have been found out in the end; the last time I saw him, he was degraded from his high rank and working in some subordinate capacity at Bludenz station.
Mattli never felt comfortable unless tracking birds; and his tales of how he shot a great white heron here and a bee-eater there, and something else somewhere else, were enough to make any one’s mouth water. He took me in hand, during those lean and hungry years; what the Brunnenmacher had done towards fostering my instincts for climbing, Mattli did for the more destructive ones; and a greater contrast was never seen than between these two early mentors of mine. The Brunnenmacher was short and fat and bearded and fair-haired and laughing, like many of them hereabouts; Mattli would have struck you at the first glance as something apart from his fellows, something primordial. He towered above the average height, he stooped from sheer tallness; the very scarecrow of a man, dusky, clean-shaven, sallow of complexion, with a harassed and hunted look in his eye and a voice that seemed to come from caverns far away. A lonely, wolfish creature! I never saw him smile. His rarer birds he sold to Mr. Honstetter, the taxidermist of Bregenz, who doubtless disposed of them elsewhere and through whose hands passed nearly every curiosity—lämmergeier, eider duck, cormorant, griffon vulture and what not—which had been obtained in the province or even further afield. He once offered me the skull and horns of a genuine Swiss ibex, and a beaver stuffed by himself which had been killed on the Elbe on the 10 August, 1886; he wanted 175 Swiss francs for this last. The only thing I ever bought there was the skin of an ibis falcinellus shot at Hard on the Lake of Constance; it cost me two and a half florins.[16]