The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [102]
She picked it up carefully to look at it more closely. It was an insect, about the length of her middle finger, thick-bodied with long rear legs. It looked like a large grasshopper, but it wasn’t a drab green color that would blend easily into the background, like the ones she had seen jumping through dry grass. This insect was striking for its brightly colored stripes of black, yellow, and orange.
The difference was wrought by the rain. During the season that was normally dry, they were grasshoppers, shy, solitary creatures, who could abide others of their kind only long enough to mate, but a remarkable change took place after the hard rainstorm. With the growth of tender new grass, the females took advantage of the abundance of food by laying many more eggs, and many more larvae survived. As the grasshopper population grew, surprising changes took place. The young grasshoppers developed startling new colors, and they began to seek out each other’s company. They were no longer grasshoppers; they had become locusts.
Soon, large bands of brightly colored locusts joined with other bands, and when they exhausted their local food supply, the locusts took to the air in masses. A swarm of five billion was not uncommon, easily covering sixty square miles and eating eighty thousand tons of vegetation in a single night.
As the leading edge of the cloud of locusts began dropping down to feed on the new green grass, Ayla and Jondalar were engulfed by the insects swarming all around them, hitting and bouncing off them and their horses. It wasn’t hard to urge Whinney and Racer to a gallop; it would have been all but impossible to restrain them. As they raced at top speed, pelted by the deluge of locusts, Ayla tried to look for Wolf, but the air was thick with flying, bouncing, hopping, leaping insects. She whistled as loud as she could, hoping he would hear above the strident roar.
She almost ran into a rose-colored starling as it swooped down and caught a locust right in front of her face. Then she realized why the birds had gathered in such large numbers. They were drawn to the immense food supply, whose bold colors were easy to see. But the sharp contrasts that attracted the birds also enabled the locusts to locate each other when they needed to fly to new feeding grounds, and even the huge flocks of birds did little to reduce the swarms of locusts as long as the vegetation remained abundant enough to support the new generations. Only when the rains stopped and the grasslands returned to their normal dry condition that could feed only small numbers, would the locusts become well-camouflaged, innocuous grasshoppers again.
The wolf found them shortly after they left the swarm behind. By the time the voracious insects were settled on the ground for the night, Ayla and Jondalar were camped far away. When they started out the next morning, they headed north again and slightly east, toward a high hill to get a view above the flat landscape that might give them some idea of the distance to the Great Mother River. Just beyond the crest of the hill they saw the edge of the area that had been visited by the cloud of locusts, the swarming mass blown by the strong winds toward the sea. They were overwhelmed by the devastation.
The beautiful, springlike countryside full of bright flowers and new grass was gone, stripped clean. As far as they could see the land was denuded. Not a leaf, not a blade of grass, not a single hint of green dressed the bare soil. Every bit of vegetation had been devoured by the ravenous horde. The only signs of life were some starlings searching out the last few locusts that had fallen behind. The earth had been ravaged, laid open, and left indecently exposed. Yet she would recover from this indignity, brought on by creatures of her own making in their natural cycles of life, and from hidden