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There's a couple of freaky stories about ants. Nasty stuff indeed.
| quote: | The next morning I was awakened by the sound of a girl screaming! The chicken, the chicken! We all scrambled out of our bags and looked at the rear of the tent where the chicken's cage was still hanging from the tree. Hiking God was shaking and people were shouting in the Batak dialect. There, in the closed cage, was the skeleton of the chicken, still perched on its stick, but stripped to the bone of every feather and piece of skin and wattle. Like a museum piece, perfectly mounted, but nothing but bone. Hiking God shook his head; he understood immediately what had happened, and this is what he told us.
The chicken had been brought along to stand guard over our camp, to warn us against the approach of the deadly Sumatran tiger in the night. But something happened that was part of the law of the jungle, but totally freaky nonetheless. When Jake had tossed his gobstopper into the column of ants and been attacked in return, the battle had only just begun. Jake was covered in ant pheremones, a chemical scent that had left a trail all the way back to our camp, several miles away! It had taken the army ants the better part of the night to regroup and follow the trail to Batah Gajah, but sometime around 3 o'clock in the morning, while us weary campers were in the depth of REM sleep, they attacked. The clucking in my dreams was the last gasps of the poor chicken as he was beset by about a hundred thousand biting fangs, inserting poison drop by drop into the helpless fowl, paralyzing him before he could even budge from his perch. This nation of jointed warriors then proceeded to quietly but surely dismember the fowl, limb from limb, stripping away its flesh but leaving the frozen, paralyzed bird standing upright to continue its night watch until the dawn.
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