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A little bit of hope, and a lot of patience – that’s how the process begins. A tiny silken thread floating on the wind, glinting in the moonlight, and a spider on the end of it, waiting for a connection. A warm breeze filters through the trees, gently swaying her to and fro on the leaf that she rests on, and all the while her focus is singular. The trailing line catches, and her instincts take over.
Firstly she tugs the strand to check that it’s stuck fast – which it is, so she pulls out new silk to attach to the leaf she’d chosen as her start point. Then, gathering up the snagged thread, she pulls herself towards the endpoint, laying out the new silk behind herself as she does so. Once she’s on the other side of the first planar line, she starts the process again. Dangling, hoping and waiting.
She can do this up to 20 times, creating a network of silken cables arcing in all directions.
The spider then has to determine which of those lines constitute seven good anchor points – they must be in a plane and distributed usefully around the circle of the web that she will occupy. She cuts away the 13 lines that she won’t use, leaving her with the 7 attachments she needs, and in her own solipsistic world.
Now, for the second step.
She begins at the outside and works her way in, pulling the anchor lines towards the centre and attaching a thread from one segment to the next with her legs, creating concentric circles all the way into the middle. Then she takes a break, her body switching the production of silk from dry to sticky to complete the final stage – the capture circle. Repeating the process from inside to out and then returning back to the centre, tugging the web taut with all eight legs, and waiting.
She ignores the rogue sycamore seeds that clatter against it, for the most part too heavy to stick – and the vibrations aren’t frantic enough, so they give themselves away. The wind pulls her this way and that, but she is unflinching. An early morning deluge batters her, and fat raindrops litter her web with their droplets, the colours of the horizon reflecting in them upside down.
It isn’t until the sun sits comfortably above the treeline that she gets her first catch. A sudden buzzing on her left sends ripples of electric energy through her creation and into her. A hoverfly with yellow and black stripes, tangled in her snare. She rushes towards it, the tip of each leg placed carefully in one of the many angles available to her. The fly pulls against its silken shackles, but it only serves to entangle itself further. She picks her way around behind its eyeline, her back legs holding the fly from the point in which it is caught. It struggles and fights, but one leg at a time she envelops it. Its wings buzz frantically, beating against her sides. She simply waits for her moment.
But her moment is interrupted.
Something charges through the bushes and tears the web out from its hard earned anchor points, severing the ties and pinning them to the front of it. Her, the fly and her web. She clings to the giant as they’re bundled out into the open.
“Oh my god!” The girl squeals, brushing herself wildly.
Her hand narrowly misses the spider, and she takes this moment to detach. She creates a new line and jumps, swinging to the ground and cutting it before the girl pulls her back with a flailing limb. On the ground amongst the grass and leaves she scuttles out of sight to the nearest bush, then steadily climbs to start again – with just one fragile thread, waiting for a connection.
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