Have You Ever Seen a River of Creatures?

It seems to be following me. Unless both of us are on the same patrol. Late summer heat. Banana leaves thud over each other like laundry on stone. Every five steps I take through the plantation, a robberfly catches up and clutches a slant of grass or curve of pseudostem.

Insects flood our path. Common emigrant butterflies in loose, haphazard flocks. Peacock pansy and yellow pansy butterflies bound on coatbutton daisies like rubber balls. Then, for three minutes, there is a deluge of blue-horned snail-killer flies. They are perched everywhere — on grass panicles, fallen fruits, leathery petals, trouser hems, and wood chips. It was a sudden mass occurrence, as the insect migration scientist Will Leo Hawkes taught me. The flies sit crouched and secretive, their bodies held by a hammock of six jointed legs. Then they travel, carried by the wind. They lay eggs inside living snails.

When the Western Ghats receives rain, its insects migrate east. They create “bioflows” or rivers of creatures. They migrate using mountain passes, riverbeds, coasts, forests, fields and high atmospheric winds. Dependent on these insect movements we know are migrations of birds and fish and cycles of vegetation cultivated and wild.

I take each step cautiously, as this is also a cobra’s beat. My foot flushes a spider wasp. It climbs out of the mulch and glides forward. It is hit by hairy lightning and pinned to a stem of ironweed. It was my stalker. I think the robberfly was using me like an egret uses a bull, seeking insects flushed out by my feet. Its eyes were green, gold, and red. Its black hypopharynx stabbed the wasp’s forehead. Headshot. There wasn’t a moment’s struggle. The wasp’s legs were splayed out, its wings frozen mid-beat. Its eyes turned milky as its brain drained away. My foot accidentally spewed grass moths at them. The fly flew from stem to stick, with the larger predator dangling from it like a ragcloth.