“Apart from the beetle, though,” mused George, “we can’t say any of it was very exciting.” He didn’t seem to be enjoying the rest. Half his twenty-one segments were off the ground and he was waving his feelers around in all directions.
“Why don’t you relax, Grndd?” asked Harry rather peevishly. “We’ve got enough food. Do you want a snack?”
“No,” said George.
“So what are you questing around for?”
George didn’t answer. He dropped to his forty-two feet and took off without another crackle.
Harry was feeling rather lazy after his night’s hunting and for once he didn’t follow. He pretty well guessed what George had gone after. It wasn’t food. He’d sensed the Something Else. The Something Else was a centeena.
Yes, George was into girls. Girl-centipedes, that is. Only Harry didn’t feel quite ready for all that yet. So he gave a centipedish sigh, laid his head on the good, warm earth, and waited.
Harry loved the no-top-world. It was so full of interesting smells and sounds. Of course he knew it could be dangerous. Apart from Hoo-Mins, which didn’t usually hunt at night, there were all those flying-swoopers and hairy-biters and belly-crawlers that I told you about to watch out for.
But then there was danger everywhere. When he was a young centi, Hoo-Mins had pushed a cloud of white-choke down into the centipedes’ tunnels and nearly killed all the little creatures that lived in them. There was always the fear that water would flood down and drown them when the Big Dropping Damp came, or that a thinner than usual belly-crawler would creep down in the bright-time and grab them as they lay asleep under their leaves.
There were hairy-biters that could dig, too. Belinda told stories about another nest she’d lived in, which had been dug up by a big ugly hairy-biter. It simply wrecked the whole beautiful maze of tunnels that the centipedes and other tunnel-dwellers had carefully burrowed, and ate everything that hadn’t run away fast enough.
Yes, it was a dangerous world, even for a big, strong, poisonous centeen like Harry.
Still, it was a good world, too, when nothing was going wrong. And nothing was going wrong tonight. It couldn’t have been more peaceful.
Harry waited for George until he got fed up, and then he decided to start shifting their prey down the tunnels to where Belinda was waiting. George could bring more when he got back.
Harry was just trying to decide whether he could get the mouse down the hole whole, or if he should do it a leg at a time, when he sensed George’s signal.
“Hx! Come quick, I’ve found something!”
When Harry heard George’s signal he forgot all about being tired. He raced off, leaving the pile of prey unguarded. It probably wouldn’t have been there when they got back.
Only they didn’t get back.
He found George standing on his rear legs examining the sides of a straight-up-hard-thing. It was something Harry didn’t like the look of – some kind of trap.
“Grndd! Come away from that – it looks like a can’t-get-out!” crackled Harry, always the cautious one.
“No, it’s not! Look, there are long openings. You can easily get in and out of it. And look what’s inside!”
Harry stood tall beside George and stuck his head in through one of the long holes. The straight-up-hard-thing was full of tree-droppings.
Harry, like nearly all centipedes, was a meat-eater. He’d never eaten the stuff that fell down from trees. So all those yellow-curves didn’t interest him. But there was some kind of meat in there too. He could smell it. Spiders, he thought.
Harry dropped on to all-forty-twos again.
“We’ve got enough, Grndd,” he said reasonably. “I don’t feel like hunting any more.”
George gave him a look of scorn.
“Oh, come on, Hx! It’s those big furry juicy ones. Just one! They’re my favourites!”
Harry was remembering that Belinda loved tarantula, especially the heads. She was really too old to catch them for herself any more.
“Oh – all right then,” said Harry. And he followed George through one of the long holes, which, in case you haven’t guessed, were actually gaps in a crate of bananas.
They followed the tarantula smell – unmistakable – into the bottom of the crate. The great spider was asleep, but it woke up with a jump as it felt them coming. It scurried on its hairy legs under a curved bunch of bananas, but George raced round to the other side of the banana-tunnel. They homed in on it from each side and stopped it before it was even properly awake. ‘Stopped’ means ‘killed’ in Centipedish – they don’t like saying ‘killed’ because it sounds too nasty.
“I must say, it smells wonderful,” said Harry. “What do you think, could we just have a nibble?” He was feeling suddenly starving after all their exertions.
“We’ll have to,” said practical George. “It’s too big to squeeze it out through those long holes unless we chew a bit off its big fat abdomen.”
“Don’t touch the head, though. We must save that for Mama.”
Well, before long the head was all that was left. And George was looking pretty hungrily at that, but Harry drew the line and said, with a centi-burp, “We’ve had enough, Grndd. Come on, we must go home now or big-yellow-ball will be coming back and then we might Dry Out.”
I ought to stress that, short of something getting them, Drying Out is the worst thing that can happen to centipedes. The rims of the breathing-holes along their backs have to stay damp or they can’t breathe, so they’re naturally very careful. In fact, if you’re a centipede, saying you’re ‘Dried-Out’ is like saying you’re done for.
They went up through the layers of bananas to the first long hole and tried to climb through it. But they were so full of tarantula that they found it was going to be a very tight squeeze indeed. Especially for Harry, who held the tarantula’s head in his poison-claw.
“We shouldn’t have eaten so much,” said Harry.
“I just couldn’t seem to stop,” said George. “H’m. Well. I suppose we’d better just curl up and have a nap till our meal has gone through and we’re thin again.”
So that’s what they did. They found a comfortable place among the bananas and fell asleep, curled up together with the head in between them, so no one could take it away.
If they’d only known it, that was the least of their worries.
They did a bit more than take a nap.
Many poisonous creatures can eat each other and not get poisoned themselves, but perhaps in this case some of the tarantula’s poison got into them, just enough to make them really sleepy. Because otherwise it’s hard to explain how they didn’t wake up when day came and the crate of bananas they were in was picked up by a forklift, loaded on to a big transporter and carried far from the banana plantation it had been in – far from their home-tunnel – far from Belinda. By the time they woke up, if they’d run their fastest for a week of nights, they couldn’t have found their way home.
Well. George had wanted an adventure. But this was going to be a lot more than even he had bargained for.