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My human legs and arms were changing to match these
first spider legs. I fell forward, no longer able
to stand erect.
It wasn't much of a fall. I was already pretty
small. The pine needles beneath me already seemed to be
as big around as a human finger.
Not that I had any fingers left to compare with.
All the while, new eyes kept opening suddenly
where eyes absolutely did not belong. Some were
compound eyes. Some weren't.
Then, as if the extra legs, and the mix "n"
match eyes, and the huge jaw-and-fang combo weren't
enough, some new leglike things came sprouting out of
my ... well, out of where my neck used to be. They
were like extra legs, only they weren't. I had no
idea what they were. But they moved. Much later,
I found out they're called
pedipalps.
A sort of cross between a mouth part and a leg.
My head was swelling, compared to the rest of my
body. It was gigantic ... in a small
way. My entire body was now divided into two
big chunks: a sort of bulging head and an even
bulgier body.
I was almost entirely spider now. The pine
needles that had seemed as big as fingers were now as
big as two-by-fours.
As the last touch, strangely soft hairs began
to grow from everywhere on my body.
It was the hair that seemed to trigger the awakening of the
spider brain.
The wolf spider has good eyes for a spider. But
it's all the thousands of tiny hairs that really get the
spider brain's attention. They sense every subtle
clue in the wind. Every minor movement in every
direction.
And all of a sudden it felt like the whole world was
moving: leaves, pine needles, the dirt beneath my
claw-tipped eight legs, bugs in the dirt,
moles under the ground, birds in the air.
All of it seemed to be hardwired into the hairs that
covered my spider body.
With all that sensory overload, the spider brain
woke up. I had been afraid it would be like the
brain of an ant: a mindless machine. Or that it would
be the terrified, fearful, panic-stricken
mind of a prey animal.
But oh, no. Definitely no.
They didn't call it a wolf spider for nothing.
This guy was tiny, no more than two inches from the end
of one outstretched leg to the end of the farthest back
leg. A toddler could easily crush him underfoot.
But I guess it isn't size alone that makes
a predator, because as soon as I felt the edge of that
spider brain I knew this boy was trouble.
The wolf spider was a killer.
Hunger.
That was pretty much what the spider mind had
to say: hunger, it was hungry. It wanted to hunt.
It wanted to kill. It wanted to eat up a few
nice juicy bugs. It was hungry.
Did I mention hunger?
And it didn't care what kind of bug. Could be
beetles, could be grasshoppers, could be
crickets, could be a big mean mantis. The
spider didn't care. It ruled the world of bugs.
It was to bugs what a lion is to a herd of
antelopes. It was a shark among guppies.
They could run from the wolf spider, but they couldn't
hide.
Motion! Something moved, left to right across
my field of vision, and I was after it like a dog af
ter a rabbit.
Eight legs powered up and I blew across the
forest floor like a drag racer firing out of the start
ing gate.
The world was weird to my eight spider eyes. I
saw colors no human ever saw. It was like when
you mess with the color and tint knobs on the TV.
Things that should have been brown were blue,
and green was red, or whatever. From some an
gles the pictures were almost clear, but a second
later everything would shatter into bits and I'd be
watching a million tiny monitors at once.
I never could make logical sense out of it.
But mostly what I saw was movement. I was very, very
interested in movement. My eyes and
every hair on my disgusting little body were about
spotting movement.
And when the right thing moved, my body just
answered all on its own.
It was a rush, as they used to say in my dad's
day. A charge. It was like tapping into the main
pipe of adrenaline. It was electric. It was
nuclear.
I blew across pine needles and fallen leaves and
over patches of dirt and I kept that moving bug in
my field of vision and I knew what I was doing,
I mean, I knew I was Marco, a human in
morph,
and I knew I didn't really want to eat that
racing
bug, but man, I was too jazzed to stop.
The prey was running and I was the predator. I had
evolved for hundreds of millions of years to do
exactly this. When Tyrannosaurus rex was still
millions of years away from even thinking about
evolving, tiny arachnid hunters were killing and
eating. The entire history of Homo sapiens from
caveman to soccer mom was a blip in the history of
spiders.
I was death on eight legs.
It was a beetle. That's what I was chasing. A
big old beetle, much larger than I was.
Larger and slower. He grew in my distorted field
of vision. He grew and grew and I powered on.
I wish I could explain why I kept on with the
hunt. Sometimes the animal brain takes over for a
while and sort of overwhelms the human mind. But
that's not what was happening to me. I wasn't
overwhelmed. I was just into it.
A last burst of speed!
My front legs touched the beetle. He
dodged left, but too slow.
I clambered right up on his back.
I positioned my jaws with their deadly fangs, and
-
It was Ax. I scampered down off the beetle,
feeling like I'd been caught doing something wrong. The
beetle ran on, relieved to have escaped. If
beetles can feel relief.
spider.> It was a pretty good answer,
I thought.
carried me away.>
spider.> Ax said.
I felt a wave of guilt and shame suddenly
swell up inside me.
cockroach. Who cares? Come on, we have a job
to do.>
me.> Ax said.
I didn't ask him what he meant.
Why had I gotten so into the hunt? Why hadn't I
resisted the urge?
I flashed on the rage I'd felt when I
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