The Sultan of Swatters Strikes Out
“I hear a bee,” my wife said the other day when we were both in the kitchen.
I heard it too. She handed me the fly swatter. I am deadly with a fly swatter. The stroke is swift and true. It is one of the few athletic skills I have left.
“There it is,” she said, “in the window.”
It was against the window pane above the sink. I raised the swatter to deliver a fatal swat. Then I realized that the bee was trapped in an invisible web. Its wings were moving but it obviously couldn’t fly. Now and then it would throw its whole body into a frenzied effort to escape. It was like a seizure. Then, evidently exhausted, it would simply hang there, as if appraising its situation.
Then I saw the spider. It was suspended, also in an invisible web, about three inches above the trapped bee. I lowered the swatter. “Might as well let nature take its course,” my wife said, reading my mind.
I was tempted to interfere, but I wasn’t sure I could. If I killed the spider, the bee would still be entangled. If I tried to free the bee, it would probably sting me. Besides, I probably couldn’t free it from the web without breaking its wings.
Anyway, I thought, what right did I have to interfere in this dance of death? It happened every second of every day. The hunter and the prey. I remembered Tennyson’s line:
Nature, red in tooth and claw
It was God’s doing. From the protozoa on up, one species preyed upon another. Who was I to intrude?
Of course we killed foxes and weasels to protect our chickens, but that was different. In that case the predators had intruded on our establishment, threatening our own prey. That man would protect his chickens was a part of the divine equation.
One does not like to kill bees. They make honey. They are industrious. They have qualities that we admire. On the other hand, spiders are sinister. They are venomous, although only a very few are dangerous to man. But they are cruel and relentless hunters. We are even told that in some species the females eat their mates after copulation. That habit has been translated into a human metaphor as the “spider woman.”
I used to kill spiders on sight. But somewhere along the line I learned that they were beneficial. A spider in the house kept even more unlovely creatures from proliferating. Some house spiders are even thought of as good omens, like lizards in Hawaii.
Years ago I killed a tarantula that was crawling up our screen door; but I regretted it. I could have spared it. Since then I have never killed a spider, except black widows when they turned up in the garage. I regard black widows as one of God’s mistakes. I have even rescued spiders from my bathtub and transferred them outdoors, where they undoubtedly fell prey to one of their other enemies.
We watched. The spider began making swift runs down its web to the bee. It touched the bee with its legs. The bee reacted violently, turning itself upside down in the web in its terror. The spider quickly withdrew. From a distance of two inches it kept an eye on its prey. Then, every minute or so, it would go down to the bee like a trapeze artist going down a ladder. Each time it would reach out toward the bee and the bee would go into one of its terrible exertions. And again the spider would withdraw. Once or twice, it seemed to me, the spider got close enough to bite the bee with its fearful pincers. Every spider, I have read, is equipped with fangs that secrete poison.
The spider was exquisitely careful, but unrelenting. Again and again it touched the bee with its kiss of death. Finally I tired of the prolonged ritual and went into the living room to finish my coffee.
Maybe 15 minutes later I went back to the window. The spider had drawn the bee to the upper corner of the window, and now had it in its fatal embrace. The bee was still, its struggle ended. It was merely a carcass. The spider, as we knew it would, had won.
Que sera, sera.
