The following is a post from Rose, a Seeker staying at Waabanong. She has a few more stories at her own website, metraylor.com.
“Okay, Andre. Ant traps. Let’s do it.”
We’ve been talking about it for suns, each trip delayed by another soggy thunderstorm. Jason tags along, and I watch his nutshell of a canoe skim the waves, prow a fingerlength above the water as Andre and I steadily paddle across the lake.
“Blueberries!” Jason exclaims as we haul the canoes up the steep bank of the landing on the northwestern corner of the lake. “Dey are ready!”
“They look like they could ripen a little more to me,” I tell them, wincing as I imagine all the bushes stripped while the berries are still green. A few are blushing a tempting purple, but nowhere near their final dreamlike blue. I’m feeling anxious to get the kids moving; taking children along on my foraging trips tends to cut them short, and I have yet to give myself graciously to the inevitability.
“Nooo, dey are ready. Dey are blue!”
“You’re bonkers,” Andre informs me, elbow deep with Jason in blueberry bushes. I manage to coax them up the hill, over a valley in the sweet forest and through a waist high meadow of feathery bracken fern and stocky milkweed to the first trap. Lifting the layers of bark stacked on the anthill one by one, I’m not sure what to expect. But nestled under the last layer we find a pile of creamy capsules, rapidly swarmed by their guardian sisters who clutch them in their mandibles and scurry down tunnels.
“Get ’em, get ’em!” Andre says, reaching into the pile.
“Let me try one!” Jason says. “Ow! Ow! Shit! Ohmygott! Ow!”
I could never have imagined myself sticking my bare hand into a swarming nest of red ants, but there I am, stuffing my mouth with fistfuls of ants, larvae, and debris. This particular variety of ants is sharply lemony, the rich, juicy larvae popping between my teeth, the satisfaction dimmed by the grit. The air is perfumed with vinegar so thickly it almost burns my eyes as the ants spray their alarm signal.
Stirring up the nest again and replacing the stack of bark, we climb the bank to an overgrown logging road strewn with ant empires, the flight of tiny grasshoppers heralding our coming.
“Did you set up this one?” Andry asks, pointing to a nest with more square footage than my tent, a mountain of sawdust under a fallen red pine riddled with a labyrinth of industrious galleries. “Fridolin and I got so much here. Like, hundreds.”
Scraping away the surface layer of the hill, we hit gold.
“Does anyone have a bandana?” Andre says in his frantic mumble, looking around wildly. “Get a bandana, get a bandana!” I have a bandana and I’m not sure what he wants to do with it as I belatedly fumble it from my belt. “Put the eggs on there!” He keeps calling them eggs and as I follow his urgent direction I keep wanting to tell him they’re not eggs, they’re larvae.
Jason stomps away, arms flailing. “AHHHHH! Dey are in my pants!” I can feel a few scurrying through my leg hair, unaware that they are scaling their predator.
We bundle up the bandana, more than a fist sized ball, briskly brushing ourselves free of incensed, battle-ready ants.
The last trap is in a little meadow thick with milkweed and raspberry. As we push through the thicket between the meadow and the trail, Jason drops into a crouch and disappears.
“Strawberries!” he exclaims. “Dey’re not done!” Andre disappears next, and I hear them crawling through the brambles.
“Remember the Rule of Three, guys. If we see three of a plant, we take one. Same for berries. That way the rest can go to seed and we’ll have more berries next Turn.”
A pause.
Andre: “What?” He says it as if it is the most bizarre and unbelievable thing he has ever heard in his dozen Turns of life.
Jason has not nearly the passion for ant larvae that he does for fruit and keeps busily harvesting, but Andre loves them enough to pull himself away from the call of the strawberries. This trap yields only a palmful of larvae that I offer to an enthused Andre, who starts eagerly popping them into his mouth.
“Okay, guys, that’s the last one. Let’s head back ho–”
“More strawberries!”
“I want to eat these eggs,” Andre says.
“Can we go sit in the shade, then?” I ask, resigned. I’m tired, and I can feel the heat pounding my head. We find a shady spot to lounge while Andre tries to winnow his larvae from the debris with a thin stream of breath. Jason, who I can’t ever remember touching me, settles into my body like a couch, giggling. I smile, wrapping an arm around him, using the other hand to snatch at a deerfly. Andre resorts to picking out larvae one by one, and Jason lays across my middle, scouring those five square feet for every strawberry.
By the time we reach the canoe landing, the stiff wind that feels so refreshing on my skin has turned the lake into a gauntlet of waves. Andre and I can barely make it away from the shore in our two person canoe, and Jason is rapidly being blown into a cove. We manage to drag our canoes together by hauling ourselves along a fallen tree, and Jason and I lash his canoe to ours with a shoelace to tow him back.
“Heave!” I shout, as if we are pirates on a galley behind our oars, and Jason laughs over the wind behind us. “Heave!” Each stroke feels like I’m paddling something the consistency of pudding.
“We can’t get stuck in his cove,” Andre shouts over his shoulder. “My mom and Gio got stuck there when it was really windy and they couldn’t get out. They had to portage.”
“Keep paddling!”
We inch our way across the lake, and as we wind our way to the water of the swim area, I see Chris and Kerstin talking. Then I watch them watch us, bemused, as we literally get blown backwards.
“Heave! Heave!”