There is a sound overhead. It is a specimen of game which I have just introduced, a Cicada, a luscious morsel. The drowsy trapper at once wakes; he moves his palpi, which quiver with cupidity. Cautiously, step by step, he climbs his inclined plane. He takes a glance outside the funnel. The Cicada is seen.
The Scarites darts out of his pit, runs forward, seizes the Cicada and drags her backwards. The struggle is brief, thanks to the trap of the entrance, which yawns like a funnel to receive even a bulky quarry and contracts into a crumbling precipice that paralyses all resistance. The slope is fatal: who crosses the brink can no longer escape the murderer.
Head first, the Cicada dives into the abyss, down which the spoiler drags her by successive jerks. She is drawn into the low-ceilinged tunnel. Here the wings cease to flutter, for lack of space. She reaches the knacker's cellar, at the end of the corridor. The Scarites now works at her for some time with his pincers, in order to reduce her to complete immobility, fearing lest she should escape; then he returns to the mouth of the charnel-house.
It is not everything to possess plenty of game; the question next arises how to consume it in peace. The door is therefore closed against importunate callers, that is to say, the insect fills the entrance to the tunnel with his mound of rubbish. Having taken this precaution, he goes back again and sits down to his meal. He will not reopen his hiding-place nor remake the pit at the entrance until later, when the Cicada has been digested and hunger makes its reappearance. Let us leave the glutton with his quarry.
The brief morning which I spent with him in his native place did not enable me to watch him at his hunting, on the sands of the beach; but the facts gathered in captivity are enough to tell us all about it. They show us in the Scarites a bold hero who is not to be intimidated by the biggest or strongest adversary.
We have seen him coming up from underground, falling on the passers-by, seizing them at some distance from the burrow and dragging them forcibly into his cut-throat den. The Rose-chafer, the Common Cockchafer are but small deer for him. He dares to attack the Cicada, he dares to dig his hooks into the corpulent Pine-chafer. He is a fearless ruffian, ready for any crime.