“Quiet,” he raged in a whisper, looking around. “I’m at the end of my row with you.” He pulled her roughly to her feet. He could’ve taken her by the arm or rolled her onto her back and eased her up that way. But he didn’t; he reached around her from behind, his hands over her breasts, and lifted her to her feet. She felt his taut body rub disgustingly against her back and butt. Finally, after what seemed like forever, he released her but wrapped his bony fingers around her arm and pulled her after him toward the mill, oblivious to her sobbing. He paused only once, to examine a long line of ants carrying tiny eggs across the path. “Don’t hurt them,” he muttered. And watched her feet carefully to make sure she didn’t.

With a sound that Rhyme had always thought was that of a butcher sharpening a knife, the turning frame swished another page of The Miniature World, which was, to judge from its battered condition, Garrett Hanlon’s favorite book.

Insects are astonishingly adept at survival. The birch moth, for example, is naturally white but in the areas surrounding industrial Manchester, England, the species’ coloring changed to black to blend in with the soot on the white tree trunks and appear less obvious to its enemies.

Rhyme flipped through more pages, his staunch left ring finger tapping the ECU controller and moving the pages, hiss, hiss, blade on steel. Reading the passages Garrett had marked. The paragraph about the ant-lion pit had saved the search party from falling into one of the boy’s traps and Rhyme was trying to draw more conclusions from the book. As fish psychologist Ben Kerr had told him, animal behavior is often a good model for human—especially when it comes to matters of survival.

Praying mantises rub their abdomens against their wings, producing an unearthly noise, which disorients pursuers. Mantises, by the way, will eat any living creature smaller than themselves, including birds and mammals….

Dung beetles are credited with giving ancient man the idea for the wheel…

A naturalist named Réaumur observed in the seventeen hundreds that wasps make paper nests from wood fiber and saliva. That gave him the idea to make paper from wood pulp, not cloth, as paper manufacturers had been doing up until then….

But what among this was revealing to the case? Was there anything that could help Rhyme find two human beings on the run somewhere in a hundred square miles of forest and swampland?