THE FISH-EATING SPIDER

For all the fish-eating spider is at home in water, it can die underground when forced there by predators. The Australian hunting wasp, Cryptocheilus australis, makes its burrows in clay or sand, out of reach of surf and fish. When the hunting wasp catches and stings a fish-eating spider, it drags the spider towards the burrow. The hunting wasp has been observed briefly abandoning the spider to return to its burrow and excavate it further, before returning to its prey. The fish-eating spider is dragged backwards by its pedipalps, and, paralysed, is stored in the burrow for eating.

#

The Fish-eating Spider preferred to do her work in Central Library. It was large and open and full of light, whereas the Science Library was dark and cramped and reminded her of burial and suffocation. It was exaggeration, she knew – she’d never been claustrophobic, but the sensation of weight never left. She was aware now, always, of the potential for danger.

It was something she’d never really considered, when she took on the job. Not seriously. The Stone Wētā had been clear, and the Fish-eating Spider couldn’t honestly say that she hadn’t been warned. But anger rising like the ocean and the opportunity to channel that anger into action was a temptation she couldn’t resist. Given the choice again she’d make the same one – science had given her stability when everything else had been taken away, and to see that undermined as well … she didn’t regret her decision.

The Fish-eating Spider just wished she could forget about it once in a while.

It made her wonder if that was the way of replacements. The Stone Wētā had gone to Mars, and it was an iconic trip, one which made the new colonists icons themselves. Larger than life, somehow, and the Fish-eating Spider felt herself small in comparison. Second-rate, without the skills or instincts of her predecessor.

The Stone Wētā wouldn’t jump at every shadow, she thought, but it didn’t stop her from jumping. And there was no-one she could go to for advice, not really. Another woman was on the ice, down in Antarctica studying creatures that weren’t arachnids, so it wasn’t as if the Fish-eating Spider could call her up and chat, even, without some excuse that would seem thin if looked at directly.

When communication could draw attention, sometimes it was better to be silent.

(Silence never helped anyone.)

The Fish-eating Spider gritted her teeth, chewed her nails to the quick and kept on regardless. She threw herself into research, that so-useful cover for operations and espionage, and was so productive that her supervisor was quickly impressed and then even more quickly worried.

“Burnout can be a genuine risk in grad students,” said her supervisor. “Be careful you’re not trying to do too much.” There was a brief hesitation. “I’ve a responsibility to act in your best interests. You’ve been sick a lot recently. Run down. You look exhausted all the time. How are you sleeping?”

“Not so good,” the Fish-eating Spider admitted. “But I’ve always been a night person.”

“Nap in the day if you have to. Your work’s been excellent, and you’re well ahead of where you should be on your thesis right now. You can afford to slack off a bit. Go out with some mates, get some exercise. What about hobbies? You were excited about the university tramping club when you first came here. You still part of that?”

The Fish-eating Spider shrugged. “Sometimes.” It was a hedge and they both knew it. She supposed that she should spend more time with the group, blend in better, but she wasn’t sure she could stand the strain of socialising right then. She cast about for something else. “I used to swim a lot,” she offered. “I miss it, but the ocean’s so cold down here.”

“There’s the hot water salt pool out at St. Clair,” said her supervisor. “You might want to think about giving it a go.”

“I will,” said the Fish-eating Spider. She said it as conciliation, mostly, knowing that the issue wouldn’t drop. Even went out to the pool once, planning for it to be only the once – enough to show willing, to say that she’d gone, to placate her supervisor and not draw further attention to herself.

It had been a surprise, how wonderful it was. A poor replacement for the warmth of the waters further north, around the island she’d had to leave, but then she was a poor replacement herself. If she closed her eyes and floated, looked up at the sky – so clean and open – she could pretend an island familiarity enough for relaxation.

Always a water-baby. It was the way her mother described her, and the Fish-eating Spider was comforted by it, in the same way that the streams comforted her when she went out for fieldwork. She was a creature of surfaces and sky, no matter how many drives she covered over with deep earth. The more time she spent in the water, the easier it was to forget the nightmares of burial that kept her hunched and frozen, waiting for predators.

#

The fish-eating spider both swims and dives. It is able to do this because it is capable of breathing underwater. The spider is covered with short, thick hydrophobic hairs, and these hairs trap air bubbles so that they form a film over the legs and body of the spider. Lungs set beneath the abdomen open into this air-bubble film, allowing the spider to breathe – but these bubbles also increase its buoyancy, so the fish-eating spider has to catch hold of an underwater rock to prevent itself from rising to the surface.

#

With water as her touchstone, the Fish-eating Spider became more proficient at navigating beneath surfaces. The sense of claustrophobia faded, and she was able to breathe more easily, restrict her sense of burial to data sets instead of self.

“Swimming’s paying off then?” said her supervisor, appearing genuinely glad. The woman was also the head of department, and the Fish-eating Spider appreciated her consideration even as it made her wince with minor embarrassment at needing that consideration in the first place. “You’ve taken on a lot. I hate to think of you being overwhelmed.”

“I’m good, thanks,” said the Fish-eating Spider, which wasn’t exactly true even if it was getting there, but she was able to put a better face on it at least, show a smooth surface. Her recovered water-sense helped: she pictured a thin sheen of liquid shielding her from the world, deceptively calm over depth.

She set data into caches, did her fieldwork, went swimming. She studied and rejoined the tramping club, made polite noises at the various Pacific Island organisations on campus. Tuvalu didn’t have a club there – Tuvalu barely had islands anymore – and kind invitations to join in from her Cook Islands flatmate and the Fijian girl who worked across from her in the lab never quite panned out.

She missed her family. Spread out now across the Pacific, some in Australia, some in Auckland. One had gone to Canada, complaining all the time about the cold.

“I’ve started your brothers on lessons,” said her mother, meaning language lessons. They’d picked up a little at home, Tuvaluan surviving in her parents’ generation mostly, but many others in the community were fluent and the boys didn’t want to stand out. The Fish-eating Spider remembered coming to New Zealand, to higher land and away from drowning, remembered too how hard she’d worked to fit in, the struggle she’d had. How cut off she felt then. How cut off she felt now.

Science, for the Fish-eating Spider, represented a stability that made it easier to breathe. She caught it up and wrapped it round her, enjoyed the way it made the world make sense.

If it had been medicine, no-one would have minded so much. “She could have been a doctor,” her mother said. “But no! It’s always spiders …”

Her mother was not fond of spiders. She tried to show an interest, but the Fish-eating Spider could always see her glazing over or, worse, biting her tongue. A doctor could have bought a lot of language lessons, a lot of sports equipment. And it was science, too, and the Fish-eating Spider could have gone to the zoo on her weekends if she liked animals so much.

“I want something to put my back against,” the Fish-eating Spider had argued. “Something solid.”

“And helping other people isn’t solid enough for you?”

“The science I do helps too,” said the Fish-eating Spider, knowing as she did that for her mother it was an unconvincing argument. Partly because there wasn’t much practical use in knowing about spiders, not in this country at least – it’d be different in Australia – and partly because, since Tuvalu, her mother had lost faith in the ability of scientists to do much of anything anyway, unless they had a stethoscope and the wherewithal to pay the mortgage.

“Look how much good science did for us,” she finished, always, and there was nothing that the Fish-eating Spider could say to that because it was true. The science was clear and present and ignored, and the rising waters had taken what an entire nation had never wanted to give. “If it could have helped then why didn’t it?”

Explanations of other interests induced nothing but tears and arguments. It was an old argument anyway, and old acceptance – that money and power had tipped the balance instead of reason, that the earth and the sea were tools for exploitation only, and the little people of the world could do nothing about it but come to understand abandonment.

It had been that more than anything else that had induced the Fish-eating Spider to take up the Stone Wētā on her offer, joining a resistance that seemed a thin and filmy thing itself to hang a method on. To join the Stone Wētā, who was abandoning in her own way, leaving a planet instead of an island and leaving it voluntarily, leaving the rest of them to clean up the mess. Forced migration was a different thing entirely, and for all the Fish-eating Spider had tried to assimilate she had been a person, once, who had a home and now that home was gone.

She wasn’t about to let another home be taken from her, and the destabilisation of science, the mutilation of it by the same forces that had taken an island, was a threat to stability and belonging. To keep that, the Fish-eating Spider would learn to breathe beneath the surface. She’d learn to conceal and adapt, to breathe her burials.

She’d do it because, unlike Tuvalu, that information one day would be able to come back. The Fish-eating Spider simply wouldn’t tolerate any less.

#

The fish-eating spider relies on ambush rather than on tunnel or webs. It waits on the edge of pools or streams and by resting its legs on the surface of the water, as if it were silk, is able to detect the ripples that signify prey. After the detection of this prey, the fish-eating spider runs along the surface of the water to trap the fish with its front legs. Once the animal is securely caught it is paralysed by an injection of neurotoxin, and its flesh is liquefied by the digestive enzymes of the fish-eating spider, which tows it through the water and back to shore for feeding.

#

Field work always increased in the summer. The Fish-eating Spider went out looking for egg sacs, peered closely beside rivers, enjoyed her bush walking. She had a number of field sites, and some of them were remote, but there were enough small landmarks that a periodic visitor could find more than arachnids, and leave more than footprints.

Most of the time she went alone. Occasionally members of the tramping club went with her, or other of the grad students – doing field work alone could be frowned on, but the Fish-eating Spider was responsible in the bush, an experienced tramper, and so her trips were winked at. She’d always preferred tramping alone anyway, but refusing company might have been noticed, and so she took her mates from the club when they asked, recruited them into spider hunting with rewards of chocolate and made no indication of caches. That meant she had to keep certain drives for longer than she would have liked, sometimes, but it was better than risking the alternative if someone woke up in the night to the sound of digging, and a spade hitting metal.

At first the Fish-eating Spider was all nerves and frustration, the desire to bury and be done, but as the water and the normalisation of her new life proceeded apace she began to relax into guardianship. Not that she ever became sloppy – the drives stayed on her at all times, except in the swimming pool when they were hidden in a small waterproof compartment in her bag, and she always had half a dozen of her own small data devices for it to blend in with, the same as any student did. But for all that the water calmed her and took her thoughts from burial, the Fish-eating Spider began to wonder if it was also enhancing her instincts, for along the back of her spine she began to feel a distant sensation of movement. It made her scared, again, but it also made her quietly, burningly angry.

There was nothing to make her suspicions concrete, not at first, but when one of her lab mates slammed the door of the computer room the department’s grad students all shared, complaining of theft, the Fish-eating Spider felt the vibrations of the slam in the tips of her fingers.

There’d been a spate of break-ins in the student flats. Televisions taken, mostly, and computers. The odd stereo, hoarded bottles of spirits. “It’s my own fault,” said her lab mate. “It’s not like we weren’t warned to be careful locking up,” with the university sending out emails full of security advice. “Whoever it was went through my jewellery box, the bastards. And my knicker drawer!”

“That’s just disgusting,” said the Fish-eating Spider. “Creeps.”

Probably a perfectly normal burglar, but after that, every day for a month, the Fish-eating Spider left her drives out in full view in the shared room, next to her laptop and her notes. She wasn’t holding anything for burial so left them all as bait, set up a tiny camera hidden by a bookshelf – all the old back issues of Nature and Science, the New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, that no-one ever looked at anyway when e-copies were available.

She always locked the door. It might look premeditated otherwise. And when one day she saw the drives taken and copied, put back carefully into their original position and the door locked again behind, she didn’t report it.

On the bright side, it wasn’t anyone that she knew. The Fish-eating Spider had distant doubts, borne of the Stone Wētā, that anyone dodgy could have gotten past the department head, but every time she met with the woman for supervision she couldn’t bring herself to comment in case those doubts lacked merit. Instead, she kept herself alert and watchful, waiting for tremors. There was nothing incriminating in those copied drives, nothing in her lab mate’s drawers either. It had the feel of a fishing expedition. The Fish-eating Spider was competent enough at those, sharing a skill-set with her thesis subject and frequently taking fishing gear out to the rivers when she researched.

But fishing expedition or not, the Fish-eating Spider did not like to be hunted. Seasons of prowling the riverbanks of the South Island for prey had made her far more comfortable with hunting. So she said nothing, did nothing, just fumed beneath the surface and waited.

Only afterwards, pulling into the lonely exit by a distant track, did she allow herself to acknowledge that anger had clouded her judgement. She’d posted on social media, as she usually did before a trip, listing the plants and animals she hoped to see – the tramping club had a bingo sheet going, and the member who photographed them all first would win a new pair of boots. “Going hunting for spiders – and tree wētā!” she posted, wearing her tramping club shirt and a big grin.

The tree wētā was on the bingo sheet, but for all its rocky name, the stone wētā was of the genus Hemideina – commonly known as the tree wētā genus.

The Fish-eating Spider set up camp by her field site stream and waited. When she saw the same face on the track as she did on the camera, felt the vibrations of his steps, she hit him hard from behind with a tree branch.

#

The fish-eating spider is the only New Zealand spider to have been observed catching fish. It is a nocturnal hunter. (Others of the same genus also hunt on or near water, but are more restricted in their diets, catching primarily insects – which the fish-eating spider Dolomedes dondalei also eats, dragging insects such as crane flies below the surface of the water.) It is theorised that fish-eating spiders – albeit of different species – are more likely to exist in warmer waters, as less oxygen in those waters forces fish to swim closer to the water’s surface.

#

“I don’t know who the hell you are,” said the Fish-eating Spider, grim as she finished tying fishing line around his arms and ankles, “but don’t think I don’t know you’ve been following me. Who are you? What do you want?”

“You’ve made a mistake,” said the man. There was a small trickle of blood oozing down his cheek but all the Fish-eating Spider knew about head wounds was they bled a lot. That wasn’t a lot, so she was prepared to believe it only a tiny graze. He seemed to be over the worst of the stunning, at any rate.

“I don’t think so.” The Fish-eating Spider would have liked to believe that he was telling the truth, that there was an innocent explanation or that he was just a garden variety pervert, someone who got off creeping on girls, searching their drawers and their drives for sex tapes. Any such hope had died as he woke up tied in fishing line – there’d been an initial struggle against the line, very brief, and then he’d stilled entirely, calm and alert.

If anyone had trussed up the Fish-eating Spider with fishing line she’d have screamed her head off.

“You’re not afraid. There’s something … wrong about that.”

“I’m afraid.”

“You hide it very well. And you haven’t answered my question. Who are you? Why are you following me?”

“I’m not following you.”

“Liar.”

“Look, you obviously don’t want to believe me. So why don’t you just call the cops and they can sort it out. If I’m as dodgy as you think they’ll take care of it.”

“I’m not calling the police,” said the Fish-eating Spider, and the man laughed at her.

“So you’re going to untie me, let me walk out of here? You can’t think I’m that dangerous, then. Might as well do it now. Whatever you might think, I don’t want to hurt you. You’re just a kid.”

The Fish-eating Spider didn’t bother to reply. A small part of her wondered if it might unnerve him, but mostly she was just too angry to speak. Tired and scared and angry, and she settled herself down with her back to a tree, the river by her side, and let her hand trail in the water, let the chill of it cool her as well, and stared at him.

“Going to be like that then, is it?” he said. “You going to try and wait me out? Let me sit here until I piss myself, maybe I’ll get angry too, say things I don’t mean to until you hear what you want?” He shifted a little, and the Fish-eating Spider watched, dispassionate. She’d tied those knots well and good. He wasn’t getting out of them in a hurry and it couldn’t be comfortable being trussed up like that.

She couldn’t bring herself to feel sorry.

“I’m not your enemy,” he said. “Look, cards on the table. I’m not a spider kind of guy. I was looking for wētā, instead I got you. You’re mixed up in something that maybe you shouldn’t be. You know it and I know it and you know that I know it. But it’s something that can be worked out, and to both our benefits.

“I really have no interest in hurting you,” he repeated. “I’ve a daughter your age. It’d just be wrong. And I know how I’d feel if someone took advantage of her, got her into trouble because she was young and idealistic and wanted to do good. But you’ve got to understand there are lots of ways of doing good. And yeah, there are some things we can’t change that maybe we could have done differently in the past, but when the chance for change is over, all you can do is position yourself to take advantage of the world that’s coming. That’s what I’d tell my little girl if she were in your position.”

“I’m not your little girl,” said the Fish-eating Spider, and the man nodded.

“No. My girl’s got her whole life set up. No student loan, no debt. When she’s finished school there’s a good job waiting for her, a down payment for a house. All because her dad’s a businessman, who’s made it his business to understand how economics works. Wouldn’t you like that? Security, a place to go?”

The Fish-eating Spider turned her head, tried not to listen. She watched her fingers comb through the surface of the water, tried not to think of her student loan, the family disappointment when she’d gone into ecology instead of medicine. There was so much that needed helping out with, her younger brothers, her parents getting on now and still scraping to pay the mortgage.

She knew what was being dangled in front of her, water being made to ripple to see if she would pounce. The hell of it was she was actually tempted. Spiders didn’t pay the bills.

Spiders were never so angry. The Fish-eating Spider felt the anger boil in her – anger at him, at the Stone Wētā for getting her involved in the first place. Anger at herself for choosing to get involved, for being weak and tempted anyway. A tear welled up, rolled down her cheek. It felt as hot as lava, as hot as toxin.

“Jesus. Don’t cry. She should be shot, getting a kid like you caught up in this. It’ll ruin your life. There’s no need. I can give you a much better option – there are people out there who’ll pay for loyalty like yours, and pay well. Try to think of a better life than this. Don’t you want that?”

A life away from riverbanks, from the scent of the bush at night, a life of hurt and hunting, of hiding …

“Come on,” he said. “Untie me, why don’t you. Let me take you home.”

“I can’t go home,” said the Fish-eating Spider, forlorn. “Home’s gone. It drowned. The water came and took it. Because of people like you,” she said, the crouching instinct rising up in an angry burn now, the stream through her fingers a reminder and an end to restraint. “You and your money and power and business, as though that was the important thing. The only important thing. And my home is gone and drowned and there’s nothing to go back to. Don’t you understand?” she said, her voice rising into wail. “It drowned.”

The fishing line was slippery, and he fought as she dragged him to the stream, but in the end the home of the Fish-eating Spider was not the only thing to be forced under the surface and kept there.