Douglas Daily Dispatch

"You can't tell me," said the guide, "that bugs don't have no brains. Folks figger that because they're small they ain't got nothin' to think with. But whales an' elephants would have just as good a right to figger that men don't know anything because they look so small to critters that weighs a couple of tons.

"A man gets a lot of chance to study life in a place like this, especially in the season when city people don't come around. An' if he keeps his eyes open, an' his thinkin' machinery in operation he learns fast. There was a while here, winter before last, when I come near makin' a discovery that would have saved humanity a lot of bother an' worry, but I lost out on account of what I was tellin' you, that bugs has got grit an' will use it when they are put to the test.

"Like everybody else that makes discoveries I was druv by self interest to mine. I found a spot down in the everglades where there was better fishin' an' shootin' than any place else in the state, an' I got the privilege of guidin' over 5,000 or 6,000 acres that a New York man owned for practically nothin'. I was surprised at gittin' it so cheap till I come down an' began to build me some shacks for me an' my customers to live in. Then I found that there was 50 or 60 hungry mosquitoes to the square inch all over the place, an' that unless I could git rid of 'em nobody would stay there overnight, much less a month.

"Well, I had a lot of time. I got here in the middle of summer an' there wasn't a chance of anybody comin' down before November, so I went over to Tampa an' got me some books about insect pests out of the library there an' read all of them from cover to cover. But all they said was to pour coal ile on the ponds an' marshes, or make smudges that would blow to leeward an' strangle the skeets, an' to do that over all that there district of mine would of took a billion bar'ls of coal ile an' about a thousand straw stacks. So I had to think up somethin' else.

"One day, when I was settin' down on the water front wonderin' why in the heck I'd ever took up guidin', instead of holdin' my job as second engineer on a tow boat, I see a big bug of some kind I didn't recognize chasin' little bugs through the air. He kep' flyin' back an' forth over the edge of the bay; an' now an' then he would make a dive, like a pelican does. He didn't git quite to the water but pretty near it, an' when his dive was over there was a big spot where he had cleared out all the gnats. That set me a thinkin'.

"I says to myself: 'If I could find out what kind of a bug that is, an' could get me some males an' females of the species an' turn them loose down in the everglades, they'd have to eat, an' there bein' not much else to eat but mosquitoes, they nachelly would eat them, an' before very long they wouldn't be no mosquitoes.'

"So the next day I got me a net, an' come back to the shore, an' inside of 10 or 15 minutes I had me a whole collection of them cannibal bugs. I took 'em up to the library an' tried to get somebody to look 'em up in a book an' tell me what they was, but nobody could. But as long as I had a few, I could look at them close myself an' net more like 'em 'till soon I would be all heeled for my big experiment. At the end of a week I must of had more'n a thousand of 'em, which was enough for a start. I put them all into boxes, an' supplied them with gnats for rations on the trip down an' set out.

"I didn't pay much attention to my livin' bug exterminators on the way down, for they was in the box, which I had tucked into a suitcase, with holes punched into it so they would breathe all right. When I got to the shack an' opened it, I got a jolt, for all the bugs was dead except one—an' that was the one I'd caught first. I could tell him by one wing which had a piece chawed out of it in some fight or other.

"Well, of course that was a disappointment. I couldn't go back to Tampa, an' I had some customers comin' over from Palm Beach to study the wild life of the everglades the next day. It was with a lot of misgivin' that I turned my one bug loose into a cloud of mosquitoes that had smelled me when I got there an' was all ready to give a party to theirselves and their friends with me for the meat course.

"It would have astonished you the way that bug made use of the opportunities he seen on all sides of him. He flew this way an' that, shot up into the air or dove down into it, an' wherever he went he cleared out them mosquitoes like one of them steam shovels would scoop up gravel. Believe it or not, inside of a hour he had the place around the shack pretty well cleared, an' all the mosquitoes I see was shovin' off for their homes out in the saw grass where they would be safe for a while.

"When they'd all gone, my bug comes staggerin' back to his box, bulgin' out amidships like a balloon, an' flops down plumb tuckered out. I went over an' took a look at him, thinkin' he must be sufferin' from acute indigestion an' wonderin' if bicarbonate of sody would do him any good even if I could find some way to get it down him. But by an' by he quit pantin' for breath, rolls over an' goes into a quiet sleep, an' the next mornin' when I took the cover off his box he sails right out an' goes to work again.

"If you've ever been in the everglades an' found you couldn't see 10 feet beyond your nose on account of the mosquitoes that was in the way you can understand the job that this bug had cut out for hisself. But he never got discouraged. He kept at work every day as long as he could fly, though sometimes he got so heavy with mosquitoes that he couldn't gain the altitudes where they was the thickest. An' it's a fact that he threw such a scare into them pests that there wasn't any of them to speak of around the shack, an' the news of danger had got out into the swamps, an' billions of 'em was emigratin' for some safer place.

"An' then one day a breeze from the east comes up an' blew them all back again. My bug see them comin', an' set out to do his duty. But he was licked before he started. He et all he could hold an' then tried to kill the rest of them by buttin' them with his nose. But they was too many. Gradual like they wore him down, an' finally, after the ground was strewed with the corpses of them he had killed he got weaker and weaker, an' at last sagged down to the ground, kicked out a couple of times with his hind legs, an' was gone.

"I s'pose I could have got more of his tribe to come an' work for me, but you know I felt kind of guilty at makin' a martyr of that game little devil, an' I never had the heart to do it. For that bug had a brain just like I have, an' he had the kind of courage that would have got a monument built for him if he'd been a man. Talk about them Balts an' Rin-Tin-Tins, an' famous war hosses, they ain't none of them that was so gritty an' so smart as that little bug was."

(Copyright, 1931, by the Bell Syndicate, Inc.)