22
EARLY THE NEXT DAY, as the rising sun warmed and dried the dew from the grassy ground of Dead Owl Cove and the Nokobee anthills all around it came to life, the Streamsider army resumed its attack. Once again Trailheader soldiers formed a defensive ring around the entrance to their nest. This time no Trailheader minors joined the sally. The buffer previously provided by these smaller workers outside the soldiers' ring was gone. The Streamsider assault was focused, massive, and unrelenting. Within an hour the force had built to maximum field strength. The Trailheader soldiers, weakening, fell one by one. No new fighters crowded in to replace those lost, and the ring broke. Streamsider soldiers and minor workers, with the elite scout in the front rank, rushed past the last of the remaining defenders and poured down the central tunnel.
As they penetrated deep and fanned out into the peripheral galleries and chambers, the Streamsider conquerors met almost no resistance. The growing strength of alarm pheromone and their own alien colony smell, filling the nest interior, drew them forth. In contrast, the Trailhead Colony exploded into pandemonium. Each defending worker was now concerned only with her own survival. The entire surviving worker force was a panicked, helpless mob. It fled upward and out into the open to break through the enemy workers massed there. Many were snared as they rushed past Streamsiders running in the opposite direction. No further communication was attempted. There would be no chance to return as an organized group. Without a queen or nest, the Trailhead Colony no longer existed. All its land, including the underground nest, was now Streamsider territory.
Most of the individual Trailheader refugees found temporary shelters on the surface, hiding beneath fallen leaves and cracks in the soil. A few met by chance and stayed together for a while. One by one, nevertheless, they were picked off by predators and enemy ants. They tried to dodge and run to hide again, but there were no odor trails and visual markers to guide them anywhere, and no nest to serve as a destination. The social organization that had defined their antness had now been stripped away. They lived individually only hours or, at most, a few days longer. One was snatched by a wolf spider, and another fell into a rain puddle. Yet another came too close to a running column of army ants, which seized it and cut it into pieces for food.
As the invaders explored the abandoned nest interior, they gathered a few newly hatched adult workers too weak to run out of the nest with their older nestmates. All these captives the Streamsider raiders carried back unharmed to their own nest, a few to be eaten but most to be kept as slaves. Their captors took advantage of a trait basic to all kinds of ants: the individual slaves learned and thereafter accepted the odor of the colony in which they lived during the first several days following their emergence from pupa into active adult life. In that brief period the Trailheader callows acquired the odor of the Streamside Colony. From that time those who were brought into the Streamsider nest and survived being cannibalized became part of the slave-maker colony. They would thereafter live on equal terms with their captors, attacking any ant with a different odor.
By adopting the young adults at the age they learned the colony odor, the victorious Streamsider Colony added to its labor force with no great effort. The slaves--and that is what they were, because they served the victors entirely--made up for some of the Streamsider workers lost in battle.
Had the Trailhead Queen been alive during the war and captured by the Streamsider raiders, she would have been torn to pieces immediately. No queen of a defeated ant colony is allowed to live one unnecessary minute. The ant mind is remorseless in its insistence upon absolute sovereignty. No colony in power, and especially no alien queen, can be tolerated, because it is a threat to that sovereignty. It follows that any alliance between colonies is also out of the question. The absolute imperative of the nest site is the heart of the superorganism's life. The first law of ant colonial existence is that the territory must be protected at any cost.
There were forces, however, above and outside the colony's frame of reference. Just three weeks before, after their victory over the Trailheaders, the Streamsiders' nest had been visited by the moving trees. The event was similar to that experienced by the defeated Trailhead Colony the previous year. The giants came from nowhere, they departed abruptly without any reason understandable to ants, and they left behind vast quantities of strange food on the ground. The conjunction of all these events, and the magnitude of the gift, made the inexplicable visitors the equivalent of benevolent gods to the Streamsiders. The ants counted the coming of the gods as special to themselves, indeed a great blessing. True to the rules of learning by association, which applies to ants as it does to men, they also saw the gods as part of their extended society: They think like us (there is no other way to think, or way to conceive of another way to think about thinking), and they are part of our power.
The Streamsiders had defeated the Trailheaders, and then, as a parallel of some Old Testament tribe wiping out a defeated people, they committed myrmicide, the ant equivalent of genocide. Total destruction ensured, as for the Roman conquerors at Carthage, that their rivals would never rise again. Now the Streamsiders spread throughout the conquered territory, laying their own odor trails and marking the ground everywhere with moist spots of feces, which contained the territorial pheromone with substances particular to them. But they did not occupy the spacious nest interior of their defeated enemy. They were content for the time being to maintain headquarters in the mother nest. They patrolled their new territory to harvest food consisting variously of prey, sugary sap-sucker excrement, and arthropod corpses. The increased supply allowed the Streamside Colony to grow more rapidly in size.
They had been summoned, and they came unknowingly to die as needed. They conquered and enslaved, and occupied the land their tribe coveted. They were obedient to their instincts, and successfully completed the cycle necessary for the survival of their species.