As spring spread across the land, so too did a black army, a sea of bodies enslaved to the will of their society. Ants. Swarming around the trunks of pine tress, they harvested the dead corpse of a squirrel.
An owl watched the teeming horde with morbid fascination.
In a matter of moments, the squirrel had been stripped away, leaving only pale
bones behind, before those too were harvested, brought back into the dark
chambers of the ant hole.
Normally, Owl wouldn’t bother himself with the affairs of
such lowly creatures, but something was different about these ants. Young
saplings were stripped of their bark and torn to shreds; rabbit holes were
attacked, their occupants consumed by the living tide. Never before had Owl
witnessed such barbarity in a colony of insects.
Owl
swooped to a lower branch. “Ants, halt this at once, lest you burn through your
resources too quickly.”
In a sudden shift, the flood of ants began scuttling up
the side of the Owl’s tree, hungrily clicking their mandibles as they climbed. With
an enraged hoot, Owl flew to a higher branch. But despite his anger, he had no
wish to see so many come to ruin. “Stop this folly, little ones. You are
damning yourselves, damning all who rely on this land for survival!”
But the ants failed to heed his words. They left him
alone and continued their assault on the land for three weeks. Once the ground
no longer yielded organic matter, they took to the trees, hunting bird nests
and stripping away bark and leaves until only bare skeletons remained.
Owl watched
the relentless assault unfold. The colony’s population swelled further and
further, until soon the land could no longer support their ravenous appetites. Within
another week, the tide had begun to calm, until finally it ceased to move. Where
once a lush forest had been, now only a field of starved corpses dwelled. Owl
gazed at the barren land from the tip his tree. With a great flap of his wings,
he soared away, leaving behind the small wasteland.
No comments:
Post a Comment