The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [135]
An enormous particolored moth flutters past. If she’d brought her net with her she would have snagged it just in case, but being netless she is content to watch it wend around a few slender trunks and then loft upward to disappear in a fan of palm leaves.
She stops at the base of a giant fig tree that is being slowly imprisoned by the roots of a strangler elm. The struggle has probably been going on for a hundred years already, and in the normal course of events it would go on for another hundred before the fig tree perished. But in this case both the attacker and the defender will be destroyed in the same quarter of an hour.
She may as well begin here today. She kneels down between the splayed, lichen-covered roots and examines the forest floor. A scatter of leaves as big as welcome mats lie in a sheen of rainwater. She takes the edge of one between her fingers and holds it up to the diffuse canopy light, which shines through the missing sections—the feeding patterns of skeletomizer insects—as it would through the missing panes of a stained-glass window. Putting the leaf aside, she studies the thin layer of ochrous soil under a fine tangle of roots and white fungal threads. A Hercules beetle is struggling to move a fig ten times its size. She removes another leaf, and a frog, black with fluorescent-yellow racing stripes, sits there for a moment before hopping away, not too concerned. Just like back home, the fluorescent colors advertise caution: predators know that these frogs are fatally poisonous if eaten. The Yanomama cook and dry their skin and stick it to the tips of the darts they blow through hollowed-out stilt-palm roots. They say a single dart can paralyze a paca in minutes.
She tears off a chunk of moss from the grappling roots and finds what she’s looking for: at least a dozen different creatures are crawling around in the underside of the moss. She sets it down gently and digs the collection kit out of her pack. With a pair of elongated cup-ended tweezers she begins with the largest species, some kind of bright-red plant bug. She collects three of them for the sake of genetic diversity and seals them in a plastic compartment.
Next she tries for a spade-shaped cockroach. These are fast, just like their urban siblings, and for a moment she considers leaving it out of her collection. Perhaps all the other gatherers will omit the cockroaches, too, out of simple prejudice, thus clearing the way for a future cockroach-free jungle. Maybe while they’re at it they could leave out the mosquitoes and the ticks as well. Back at the station they all joke about this, but they know that for every species lost, a dozen others that feed on it will be likewise doomed.
She works her way down to the smaller bugs, which are far more numerous. Even after all these months she still hasn’t learned enough about entomology to know whether some of these smaller ones are just baby versions of the larger ones she’s already gotten. For that matter, she doesn’t know for sure that every creature she will manage to collect today hasn’t already been gathered a half dozen times by other gatherers. It’s unlikely, though, since at any given time a single tree can house ten thousand different species of insects. If she’d wanted to she could have spent her whole time here on this tree alone,