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When all movement subsides, the Pompilus makes ready to drag her prey elsewhere. It is then I take charge of it. What strikes me more than anything else is the absolute inertia of the fangs, which I tickle with a straw without succeeding in rousing them from their torpor. The palpi, on the other hand, their immediate neighbours, wave at the least touch.
She adopted it without any studied choice; she stopped there just long enough to hoist her Spider to the top; she saw it for the first time and saw it hurriedly, in passing. Is that rapid glance enough to provide an exact recollection? Besides, there are now two localities to be modelled in the insect's memory: the first shelf may easily be confused with the second. To which will the Pompilus go?
What a shelter for the larva of this Pompilus: the warm retreat and downy hammock of the Segestria! Here then, already, we have two Spider-huntresses, the Ringed Pompilus and P. apicalis, who, unversed in the miner's craft, establish their offspring inexpensively in accidental chinks in the walls, or even in the lair of the Spider on whom the larva feeds.
Once I see her lie on her back and hold the Pompilus above her, as far away as possible, while turning her over in her fore-legs and munching at her with her mandibles. The Wasp, whether by her own adroitness or owing to the Spider's dread of her, promptly escapes from the terrible fangs, moves to a short distance and does not seem to trouble unduly about the buffeting which she has received.
I learn by inserting a straw that it is inhabited by a Tarantula of a size suited to my plans. The soil around the aperture is cleared and flattened to receive the wire-gauze, under which I place a Pompilus. This is the time to light a pipe and wait, lying on the pebbles...Yet another disappointment.
The Pompilus therefore feels an insuperable reluctance to make straight for the Spider when the latter is at home in the midst of her snares. And she is right, a hundred times over. If the Tarantula understands the practice of the dagger-thrust in the neck, which is immediately fatal, the other cannot be unacquainted with it.
"The Hunting Wasps": passim. The most important matter has escaped me. What I wanted, what I still want to see is the Pompilus engaged in mortal combat with the Lycosa. What a duel, in which the cunning of the one has to overcome the terrible weapons of the other! Does the Wasp enter the burrow to surprise the Tarantula at the bottom of her lair? Such temerity would be fatal to her.
When convinced, by untiring explorations, that her prey is no longer on the tuft where she laid it, the Pompilus, as we were saying, looks for it in the neighbourhood and finds it pretty easily, for I am careful to put it in an exposed place. Let us increase the difficulty to some extent.
Her neighbour, a little later, does better than this: while the huntress is prowling about in the neighbourhood of the funnel, she suddenly leaps out of the tube, with the lifeline which will save her from falling, should she miss her footing, attached to her spinnerets; she rushes forward and hurls herself in front of the Pompilus, at a distance of some eight inches from her burrow.
The Harlequin Pompilus does not disregard this counsel of prudence. The Epeira carries beneath her throat two sharp daggers, with a drop of poison at their points; the Calicurgus is lost if the Spider bites her. Nevertheless, her anaesthetizing demands perfect steadiness of the lancet. What is to be done in the face of this danger which might disconcert the most practised surgeon?
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