My next glance into the pit showed a large toad, squatted on a small shelf of sand, close to the edge of a crowded column of ants. He was a rough old-chap, covered with warts and corrugations, and pigmented in dark gray, with mottlings of chocolate and dull red and occasional glints of gold. He was crouched flat, with all his fingers and toes tucked in beneath him. His head was drawn in, his eyes closed, and all his exposed surface was sticky with his acid perspiration--the sweat of fear. He knew his danger--of that there was no doubt--and he was apparently aware of the fact that he could not escape. Resignedly he had settled on the very line of traffic of the deadly foe, after intrenching himself and summoning to his aid all the defenses with which nature had endowed him. And he was winning out--the first vertebrate I have ever known to withstand the army ants. For a few minutes he would be ignored and his sides would vibrate as he breathed with feverish rapidity. Then two or three ants would run toward him, play upon him with their antennæ, and examine him suspiciously. During this time he was immovable. Even when a soldier sank his mandibles deep into the roughened skin and wrenched viciously, the toad never moved. He might have been a parti-colored pebble embedded in its matrix of sand. Once, when three bit him simultaneously, he winced, and the whitish, acrid juice oozed from his pores. Usually the ants were content with merely examining him. I left him when I saw that he was in no immediate danger.
One other creature was quiescent in the pit and yet lived: a big, brown, hardbacked millipede. Like the frog, he fully realized his danger and had sunk his bulk partly into the sand, bending down head and tail and presenting only mailed segments. A mob of ants were trying vainly to bite their way into this organic citadel.
For the dozens of grasshoppers, crickets, roaches, beetles, spiders, ants, and harvest men, there was no escape. One daddy-long-legs did a pitiful dance of death. Supported on his eight long legs, he stood high out of reach of his assailants. He was balanced so exactly that the instant a feeling antenna touched a leg, he would lift it out of reach. Even when two or three were simultaneously threatened, he raised them, and at one time stood perfectly balanced on four legs, the other four waving in air. But his _kismet_ came with a concerted rush of half a dozen ants, which overbore him, and in a fraction of time his body, with two long legs trailing behind, was straddled by a small worker and borne rapidly away.