Natural Selection (A Free Spider Shepherd short story) Read Free

from now on, you’re going to be more silent than Trappist monks. If we need to communicate, it’ll be done by signs or whispers.’ He turned and walked back to his basha.
    ‘Impressive,’ Shepherd said to Liam as Jimbo and Geordie ambled away. ‘Walks the walk and talks the talk.’
    Liam nodded. ‘Looks like you got your wish, that’s for sure.’
    The next morning they woke before first light, as soon as the insect dawn chorus began. Following Pilgrim’s example, Shepherd and the others broke down their bashas, packed their bergens and then sat motionless, listening and scenting the air. As soon as it was light enough to move, Pilgrim led them out of the clearing and into the jungle. As they moved on, the undergrowth grew dense and almost impenetrable.  Thickets of understory palm formed fearsome barriers, spines bristling at all angles from the trunks. Above them, the succeeding layers of trees were bound together in the stifling embrace of lianas. However, Pilgrim led the way, following animal tracks so faint that at first Shepherd and the others could barely detect them at all. They continued their painstaking progress through the jungle for about fifty minutes, then stopped, sat and listened again. They brewed up a mug of tea, ate some hard tackbiscuits and moved off again for another fifty minutes, then stopped for another ten.
    As they went along, Pilgrim would occasionally stop and ask one of them where they thought they were, making them use the fine point of a leaf to indicate the exact place on the map.  Liam, Jimbo and Geordie were generally wrong but Shepherd was more often than not correct to a few dozen metres. Whenever Shepherd did correctly pinpoint their location, Pilgrim would reward him with a grunt of acknowledgement which he took to be the highest praise any of them was ever likely to receive from the man. Navigation had always been one of Shepherd’s strengths, his near-photographic memory meant that he usually knew exactly where he was, even if he didn’t have a physical map to hand.
    The stop-start patrolling routine continued until midday when they stopped for an hour and ate a lunch of more tea, biscuits and cheese, then carried on patrolling until two hours before dark, when they ate their main meal of patrol rations, tea and more hard tack biscuits. After that the patrol moved on for another hour, then sat and listened again. Once they were sure everything was quiet, they doubled back on their tracks, stopped to listen again for one more hour and then after night had fallen, they put up their bashas, changed into clothes from their bergens that were only damp instead of soaking wet, and stripped down, cleaned and oiled their weapons. They did it one at a time, so that the rest of the patrol was always armed and ready to respond to any threat. Eventually they bedded down for the night on the jungle floor, using a candle to read or study for an hour or two.
     Shepherd lit a candle and unpacked his kit then sat by his basha and stared into the black depths of the jungle. The iridescent shells of beetles sparkled in the flickering light of his candle and huge luminous eyes reflected it back to him. Lizards of all colours, salamanders and frogs were captured by the light for a moment before disappearing among the foliage.
    He blew out the candle and lay back, feeling rather than hearing the sonar of bats swooping and twisting between the trees as they hunted down moths, while a torrent of other noises flooded through the darkness. A gibnut foraging in the litter of the forest floor gave a hoarse bark and clattered off deeper into the jungle. A howler monkey screamed its defiance into the night, frogs and toads croaked endlessly and there was the squeaking, buzzing, clicking and rattling of a million insects, but none of the jungle noise sounded threatening to him, not even the snarl of a jaguar deep in the forest. He fell asleep at once, so tired from the exertions of the day that he was