Fridolin looked at Maya with an air of grave importance, lifting his brows and shaking his head two or three times. It seemed to please him that he knew something she didn’t know.
“Too big? What difference does his size make? No, my dear, it’s not his size we are afraid of; it’s his tongue.”
Maya made big eyes.
Fridolin told her about the woodpecker’s tongue: that it was long and thin, and round as a worm, and barbed and sticky.
“He can stretch his tongue out ten times my length,” cried the bark-beetle, flourishing his arm. “You think: ‘now—now he has reached the limit, he can’t make it the tiniest bit longer.’ But no, he goes on stretching and stretching it. He pokes it deep into all the cracks and crevices of the bark, on the chance that he’ll find somebody sitting there. He even pushes it into our passageways—actually, into our corridors and chambers. Things stick to it, and that’s the way he pulls us out of our homes.”
“I am not a coward,” said Maya, “I don’t think I am, but what you say makes me creepy.”
“Oh, you’re all right,” said Fridolin, a little envious, “you with your sting are safe. A person’ll think twice before he’ll let you sting his tongue. Anybody’ll tell you that. But how about us bark-beetles? How do you think we feel? A cousin of mine got caught. We had just had a little quarrel on account of my wife. I remember every detail perfectly. My cousin was paying us a visit and hadn’t yet got used to our ways or our arrangements. All of a sudden we heard a woodpecker scratching and boring—one of the smaller species. It must have begun right at our building because as a rule we hear him beforehand and have time to run to shelter before he reaches us.
“Suddenly I heard my poor cousin scream in the dark: ‘Fridolin, I’m sticking!’ Then all I heard was a short desperate scuffle, followed by complete silence, and in a few moments the woodpecker was hammering at the house next door. My poor cousin! Her name was Agatha.”
“Feel how my heart is beating,” said Maya, in a whisper. “You oughtn’t to have told it so quickly. My goodness, the things that do happen!” And the little bee thought of her own adventures in the past and the accidents that might still happen to her.
A laugh from Fridolin interrupted her reflections. She looked up in surprise.