e doubts about the joys of victory.

For a curious drowsiness was coming over him. Perhaps, disquieting
thought, it was the approaching stupor of the poison's working. His
strong long legs became limp, they would not work regularly, they could
not hold his heavy hairy body up from the ground. He would get into his
hole and rest. But it was too late. And after a few uneven steps, victor
Eurypelma settled heavily down beside his amazon victim, inert and
forevermore beyond fighting. He was paralyzed.

And so Mary and I brought him home in our collecting box, together with
the torn body of Pepsis with her wings of slow fire dulled by the dust
of her last struggles. And though it is a whole month now since
Eurypelma received his stab from the poisoned javelin of Pepsis, he has
not recovered; nor will he ever. When you touch him, he draws up slowly
one leg after another, or moves a palpus feebly. But it is living death;
a hopeless paralytic is the king.

Dear reader, you are of course as bright as Mary, and so you have
noticed, as she did right away, the close parallel between what happened
to Eurypelma and what happened to the measuring-worms brought by
Ammophila to her nest burrow as described in the first story in this
book. And so, like Mary, you realize that the vendetta or life feud
between the tarantula family and the family of Pepsis, the tarantula
hawk, is based on reasons of domestic economy rather than on those of
sentiment, which determine vendettas in Corsica and feuds in Kentucky.

To be quite plain, Pepsis fights Eurypelma to get his huge, juicy body
for food for her young; and Eurypelma fights Pepsis to keep from
becoming paralyzed provender. If Pepsis had escaped unhurt in the combat
at which Mary and I "assisted," as the French say, as enthralled
spectators, we should have seen her drag by mighty effort the limp,
paralyzed, spider giant to her nest hole not far distant--a great hole
twelve inches deep and with a side chamber at the bottom. There she
would have thrust him down the throat of the burrow, and then crawled in
and laid an egg on the helpless beast, from which in time would have
hatched the carnivorous wasp grub. Pepsis has many close allies among
the wasps, all black or steely blue with smoky or dull-bronze wings, and
they all use spiders, stung and paralyzed, to store their nest holes
with.

"Do the little black and blue wasps hunt the little spiders and the
larger ones the big spiders?" ask