Micro

Peter searched for signs of envenomation. He stared into Danny’s eyes, looking for constriction or dilation of the pupils. His eyes seemed normal. He took Danny’s pulse, noted his respiration, and looked for changes in skin color or mental state. Danny seemed very frightened. Peter inspected Danny’s arm. The skin had a normal color, but the arm was limp. He pinched the arm. “Did you feel that?”

Danny shook his head.

“Nausea? Pain?” he asked Danny.

“No poison…No poison…”

“I don’t think you’ve been envenomed.” If there had been venom in the sting, then Danny would be extremely sick, with severe pain, or even dead. But his vital signs remained stable. “I think you scared it away. What was it, anyway?”

“A bee or a wasp,” Danny muttered. “I don’t know.”

Wasps were much more common than bees. Hawaii probably had thousands of different kinds of wasps, many of them unnamed and unidentified. There was no telling what kind of wasp had stung Danny-if it had been a wasp at all. Peter opened a Band-Aid and placed it over the puncture in Danny’s shoulder. Then he tore off the sleeve of his own shirt and turned it into a makeshift arm sling for Danny. He wondered how to get Danny down to the ground. “Do you feel able to jump?”

“No. Maybe.”

“It won’t hurt us.” Then Peter called on the radio to Karen King and Erika Moll, who were still at the top of the tree. “Danny and I are going to jump to the ground. You might as well do the same.”

Karen and Erika leaned out from a cluster of leaves. They couldn’t see the ground. Karen glanced at Erika, who nodded. “We’re cool,” Karen said on the radio, and she checked to make sure the blowgun was strapped tightly to her back. “One, two, three…” Erika jumped first, Karen following moments later.

As she fell into space, Karen spread-eagled herself like a skydiver. She went into a glide. “Wow!” she shouted. She could see Erika falling below her, and Erika was shouting. They were gliding, and it was controllable. Karen moved her legs and arms, and went off at a slant. She could feel the air flowing over her body, thick and soft, supporting her weight. This was like bodysurfing, except it was in air rather than water. She slammed into a branch and tumbled into space, unhurt, and spread her arms again, and surfed the liquid wind, descending through the tree. She saw Erika diving at an angle below her. Erika had gotten ahead of her, was falling faster.

Karen wanted to slow herself down. She rolled her body leftward and rightward, catching the air and using her arms and legs to slow her fall. “Whooo!” she yelled. Leaves were coming. She had lost sight of Erika…she heard Erika scream…

She burst through the leaves…and a spiderweb lay dead-ahead. Erika was trapped in it, bouncing up and down, thrashing her arms and legs, trying to escape. A pale green spider clung to the edge of the web…A crab spider…very poisonous…

Karen rolled her body sideways as she fell, her knowledge of this spider flashing through her mind. She needed to fall into the web. It was the only way to save Erika. Gotta hit the web. She had no fear. She could handle a crab spider…She slammed into the edge of the web and hung there, bouncing in midair.

To Karen, the web seemed maybe fifty or sixty feet across, far bigger than a safety net in a circus. Unlike a safety net, the web was sticky, its radial threads spangled with droplets of glue. She felt the glue soaking into her clothes, pinning her to the web, while Erika struggled in a blind panic, screaming for help, trapped in threads out of Karen’s reach. The crab spider seemed to hesitate. Possibly it didn’t recognize the humans as prey, Karen thought. But it would attack, she thought, and soon. The attack would come in a rush. “Hold still,” she called to Erika. She rolled herself over until she was facing the spider, and drew her machete. “Yah!” she shouted at the spider. Her eyes moved rapidly over the web. She was looking for a trigger line, and she saw it-a thread running from one of the spider’s feet across the spiral threads to the center. She flung herself across the web and cut the trigger line.

The spider used the trigger line to sense the presence of prey in the web. Cutting the trigger line was like cutting a nerve. It also alarmed the spider.

The spider suddenly fled, running away and tucking itself inside a curled-up leaf-its home.

“Most of ’em scare easily,” Karen said to Erika. She cut another thread, and the two women fell free, while Karen called back to the spider, “Sorry, sweetheart.”

They landed together on the ground amid a tangle of sticky silk. Erika was badly shaken. “I thought I was going to die.”

Karen pulled threads of silk off her. “Nothing to worry about as long as you know the structure of the web.”

“But I’m a beetle person,” Erika answered.