The Little Wolf of the Air
he pool lay shimmering and basking in the flood of the June sun. On three sides, east, west, and north, the willows and birches gathered close about it, their light leafage hanging motionless in the clear, still heat. On the south side it lay open toward the thick-grassed meadows, where bees and flies of innumerable species flickered lazily over the pale crimson clover-blooms. From the clover-blooms and the vetch-blooms, the wheel-rayed daisies, and the tall umbels of the wild parsnip, strange perfumes kept distilling in the heat and pulsing in across the pool on breaths of air too soft to ruffle its surface.
Above this unruffled surface the air was full of dancing life. Gnats hung in little, whirling nebulæ; mosquitoes, wasplike flies, and whirring, shard-winged beetles, passed and repassed each other in intricate lines of flight; and, here and there, lucently flashing on long, transparent, veined wings, darted the dragon-flies in their gemlike mail. Their movements were so swift, powerful, and light that it was difficult, in spite of their size and radiant colour, to detect the business that kept the dragon-flies so incessantly and tirelessly in action. Sometimes two or three would hurtle out for a brief expedition over the blossoming meadow. Often one would alight for a moment on a leaf or twig in the sun, and lie there gleaming, its two pairs of wings flatly outspread in a way that showed every delicate interlacing of the nerves. Then it would rise again into the air with a bold, vehement spring; and when ever it began its flight, or whenever it abruptly changed the direction of its flight, its wings would make a dry, sharp, rustling sound.
The business that so occupied these winged and flashing gems, these darting iridescences, was in truth the universal business of hunting. But there were few indeed among all the kindred of earth, air, and water whose hunting was so savage and so ravenous as that of these slender and spiritlike beings. With appetites insatiable, ferocity implacable, strength and courage prodigious for their stature, to call them the little wolves of the air is perhaps to wrong the ravening gray pack whose howlings strike terror down the corridors of the winter forest. Mosquitoes and gnats they hunted every moment, devouring them in such countless numbers as to merit the gratitude of every creature that calls the mosquito its foe. But every summer fly, also, was acceptable prey to these indomitable hunters, every velvet-bodied moth, every painted butterfly. And even the envenomed wasp, whose weapon no insect can withstand, was not safe. If the dragon-fly could catch her engrossed in some small slaughter of her own, and, pouncing upon her from above, grip the back of her armed abdomen in his great grinding jaws, her sting could do nothing but dart out vainly like a dark, licking flame; and she would prove as good a meal as the most unresisting bluebottle or horse-fly.
Down to the pool, through the luxurious shadows of the birches, came a man, and stretched himself against a leaning trunk by the waterside. At his approach, all the business of life and death and mating in his immediate neighbourhood came to a halt, and most of the winged kindred, except the mosquitoes, drew away from him. The mosquitoes, to whom he had become, so to speak, in a measure acclimatized, attacked him with less enthusiasm than they would have displayed in the case of a stranger, and failed to cause him serious annoyance. He fixed himself in a position that was thoroughly comfortable, and then lay quite still.
The man's face was under the shadow of the birch-tree, but his body lay out in the full sun, and the front of his soft white summer shirt made a patch of sharp light against the surrounding tones of brown and green. When it had for a time remained quite still, the patch of whiteness attracted attention, and various insects alighted upon it to investigate. Presently the man noticed a very large steel-blue dragon-fly on rustling wings balancing in the air a few feet in front of him. At this moment, from a branch overhead, a hungry shrike dashed down. The dragon-fly saw the peril just in time; and, instead of fleeing desperately across the pool, to be almost inevitably overtaken by the strong-winged bird, it dashed forward and perched for refuge on a fold of the dazzling white shirt. The foiled shrike, with an angry and astonished twitter, flew off to a tree across the pool.
For perhaps a minute the great fly stood with moveless, wide-spread wings, scintillating aerial hues as if its body was compacted of a million microscopic prisms. The transparent tissue of its wings was filled with a finer and more elusive iridescence. The great rounded, globose, overlapping jaws, half as big as the creature's whole head, kept opening and shutting, as if to polish their edges. The other half of its head was quite occupied by two bulging, brilliant spheres of eyes, which seemed to hold in their transparent yet curiously impenetrable depths a shifting light of emerald and violet. These inscrutable and enormous eyes—each one nearly as great in circumference as the creature's body—rolled themselves in a steady stare at the man's face, till he felt the skin of his cheeks creep at their sinister beauty. It seemed to him as if a spirit hostile and evil had threatened him from beneath those shining eyes; and he was amused to experience, for all his interest, a sense of half-relief when the four beautiful wings hurtled crisply and the creature darted away.
It would seem, however, that the fold of white shirt had found favour in those mysteriously gleaming eyes; for a minute or two later the same fly returned to the same spot. The man recognized not only its unusual size and its splendour of colour, but a broken notch on one of its wing films, the mark of the tip of a bird's beak. This time the dragon-fly came not as a fugitive from fate, but as a triumphant dispenser of fate to others. It carried between its jaws the body of a small green grasshopper, which it had already partly eaten.