The man shook his head, miserable. “I tried, but it’s the damndest thing, Doctor Hubbard! There isn’t a one of them to be seen now!”

Elias Johnson supported the young man. “When Russ told me that, I went out to look for myself.” He slapped the table. “Something or somebody has cleared off every damn rat these fellows saw before.”

Craig Soaras confirmed it too. “I went back. I couldn’t believe it.”

Russell Homer added, “And not a one in my car, either! Craig saw them this morning, piled in there like it was a hearse!”

“What could go after dead rats that way?” Johnson asked the scientist with open anxiety.

In Peter Hubbard’s scientifically moving mind, the Harvard man was scanning his memory for parallels in the realm of animal behavior. It was common knowledge that many vertebrate predators dragged prey back to hidden caves and burrows to feed themselves and their young. In the insect world there were also many examples. The classical case of the Polyergus refusens was one. This was the species of ants that enslaved other ants, specifically the Formica. The way they went about it made a fascinating pattern even to a scientist whose business was the amazing variations of natural conduct.

If a scout of a Polyergus colony came on a nest of the genus Formica, she would hurry back to her home nest. Along the trail the scout would deposit on the ground the specific odor that signaled the presence of the Formica. Promptly, a phalanx of Polyergus workers would go slave hunting. After they overcame the defenders, they would seize the Formica pupae in which young were developing, and bring them back to the Polyergus nest. There they would hatch into the slave workers.

Hubbard tapped his pipe on the table thoughtfully. There were hundreds of similar instances in biology. Few people other than trained biologists, he considered, had any real notion of the complicated adjustments Nature used to accomplish her purposes. Sometimes they seemed like exquisite clockwork parts all fitted together with fantastic precision.

The ability of insects to move objects many times their own weight was remarkable, to be sure, but it was a relatively undramatic example of Nature’s inventiveness. Peter Hubbard reflected on what his students called The Case of the Dichocheles.

This insect was a mite that lived in the ears of moths. The trick was that one moth ear had to be left open, so that the infested insect could still have enough hearing to detect the sonar of the bats that came after moths for food.

If both of a moth’s ears were infected, it would be deafened and soon fall prey to a bat—and the mite would perish along with its host.