He does not so
regard the green tree-ant in vain. He knows when the pocket is packed
with white larvae and white helpless infant ants, or with helpless green
ones big of abdomen, and consenting to the assaults of the adults, cuts
away the supporting branch and shakes off the furious citizens, or
expels them with the smoke and fire of paper-bark torches, or, maybe,
casts the pocket into water so that the adult ants may swim ashore,
abandoning those that cannot, on account of immaturity or incompetence,
to their fate.
Eaten raw, the larvae are pungent morsels, or macerated in water in
company with relatives distended to the degree of helplessness, form a
cordial that is sharp to the palate, scarifying to the throat, and
consoling to the stomach replete with the cold and sodden foods with
which blacks often have to be content.
Tetchy and quarrelsome, staccato in action, the warriors of a colony
bury their forceps in the skin and stand upon their heads to give all
their weight to the attack; but each individual retains its grip until
squashed and crumpled up, and the human being who has suffered the
assault comments on it in language corresponding with the sensitiveness
or otherwise of his skin.
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