How did I know what the ants had for dinner last Monday? It is odd that I should have known, but I’ll tell you how it happened.

I was sitting under a big pine tree, high up on a hillside. The hillside was more than seven thousand feet above the sea, and that is higher than many mountains which people travel hundreds of miles to look at. But this hillside was in Colorado, so there was nothing wonderful in being up so high.

I had been watching the great mountains with snow on them, and the great forests of pine trees—miles and miles of them—so close together that it looks as if you could lie down on their tops and not fall through; and my eyes were tired with looking at such great, grand things, so many miles off.

So I looked down on the ground where I was sitting, and watched the ants which were running about everywhere, as busy and restless as if they had the whole world on their shoulders.

Suddenly I saw a tiny caterpillar, which seemed to be bounding along in a very strange way. In a second more I saw an ant seize hold of him and begin to drag him off.

The caterpillar was three times as long as the ant, and his body was more than twice as large round as the biggest part of the ant’s body.

“Ho! ho! Mr. Ant,” said I, “you needn’t think you’re going to be strong enough to drag that fellow very far.”

Why, it was about the same thing as if you or I should drag off a calf, which was kicking and struggling all the time; only that the calf hasn’t half so many legs to catch hold of things with as the caterpillar had.

Poor caterpillar! how he did try to get away! But the ant never gave him a second’s time to take a good grip of anything; and he was cunning enough, too, to drag him on his side, so that he couldn’t use his legs very well.

Up and down, and under and over stones and sticks; in and out of tufts of grass; up to the very top of the tallest blades, and then down again; over gravel and sand, and across bridges of pine needles from stone to stone; backward all the way ran that ant, dragging the caterpillar after him.

I watched him very closely, thinking, of course, he must be going toward his house. Presently he darted up the trunk of a pine tree.

“Dear me!” said I, “ants don’t live in trees! What does this mean?”

The bark of the tree was all broken and jagged, and full of seams twenty times as deep as the height of the ant’s body. But he didn’t mind; down one side and up the other he went.

They must have been awful chasms to him, and yet he never once stopped or went a bit slower. I had to watch the ant very closely, not to lose sight of him altogether.

I began to think that he was merely trying to kill the caterpillar; that, perhaps, he didn’t mean to eat him, after all. How did I know but some ants might hunt caterpillars, just as some men hunt deer, for fun, and not at all because they need food?

If I had been sure of this, I would have spoiled Mr. Ant’s sport for him very soon, you may be sure, and set the poor caterpillar free. But I never heard of an ant’s being cruel; and if it were really for dinner for his family that he was working so hard, I thought he ought to be helped, and not hindered.

Just then I heard a sharp cry overhead. I looked up, and there was an enormous hawk, sailing round in circles, with two small birds flying after him. They were pouncing down on his head, and then darting away, and all the time making shrill cries of fright and hatred.

I knew very well what that meant. Mr. Hawk was also out trying to do some marketing for his dinner. He had his eye on some little birds in their nest, and there were the father and mother birds driving him away.

You wouldn’t have believed that two such little birds could drive off such a big creature as the hawk, but they did. They seemed to fairly buzz round his head just as flies buzz round a horse’s head.

At last he gave up the quest and flew off so far that he vanished in the blue sky, and the little birds came skimming home again into the forest.

“Well, well,” said I, “the little people are stronger than the big ones, after all! Where has my ant gone?”

Sure enough! It hadn’t been two minutes that I had been watching the hawk and the birds, but in that two minutes the ant and the caterpillar had disappeared. At last I found them,—where do you think? In a fold of my coat, on which I was sitting!

The ant was running round and round the caterpillar. I shook the fold out, and as soon as the cloth lay straight and smooth, the ant fastened his nippers into his prey and started off as fast as ever.

I suppose if I could have seen his face, and had understood the language of ants’ features, I should have seen plainly written there, “Dear me, what sort of a country was that I tumbled into?”

By this time the caterpillar had had the breath pretty well knocked out of his body, and was so limp and helpless that the ant was not afraid of his getting away from him. So he stopped now and then to rest.

Sometimes he would spring on the caterpillar’s back, and stretch himself out there; sometimes he would stand still on one side and look at him sharply, keeping one nipper on his head.

All the time he was working steadily in one direction; he was headed for home I felt certain.

It astonished me very much, at first, that none of the ants he met took any notice of him; they all went on their own way, and never took so much as a sniff at the caterpillar.

But pretty soon I said to myself, “You stupid woman, not to suppose that ants can be as well behaved as people! When you passed Mr. Jones yesterday, you didn’t peep into his market-basket, nor touch the cabbage he had under his arm.”

Presently the ant dropped the caterpillar, and ran on a few steps—I mean inches—to meet another ant who was coming towards him. They put their heads close together for a second.

I could not hear what they said, but I could easily imagine, for they both ran quickly back to the caterpillar, and one took him by the head and the other by the tail, and then they lugged him along finely. It was only a few steps, however, to the ant’s house; that was the reason he happened to meet this friend just coming out.

The door was a round hole in the ground, about as big as my little finger. Several ants were standing in the doorway, watching these two come up with the caterpillar. They all took hold as soon as the caterpillar was on the doorstep, and almost before I knew he was there, they had tumbled him down, heels over head, into the ground, and that was the last I saw of him.

The oddest thing was, how the ants came running home from all directions. I don’t believe there was any dinner bell rung, though there might have been one too fine for my ears to hear; but in a minute, I counted thirty-three ants running down that hole. I fancied they looked as hungry as wolves.

I had a great mind to dig down into the hole with a stick, and see what had become of the caterpillar. But I thought it wasn’t quite fair to take the roof off a man’s house to find out how he cooks his beef for dinner; so I sat still and wondered whether they would eat him all up or whether they would leave any for Tuesday; then I went home to my own dinner.

—Helen Hunt Jackson.