Along Came The Deck Spider

Emily Mann

I called her Deck Spider. A garden orb weaver, she moved in during the noisy heat of cicada season, spinning a tall vertical web from the gutter to the deck beside my glass sliding doors. Soon, a gum-leaf bivouac appeared on the gutter where she hid during the day, legs drawn tightly around her face, a silk fishing line hooked over one leg to detect shivers in her web.

She snared cicadas four or five times her size, shrouding them in sticky white thread before sucking them dry. Ninety minutes to drain a corpse. Her body swelled and her wolf-like colour deepened. Sometimes she wouldn’t catch anything all week. Wanting to help, I would flick on the porchlight after dark to lure careless beetles to our door.

Deck Spider regularly swept gum leaves and rotten prey from her web, but I never saw her do it. How does a spider unglue objects without breaking its web? I needed to see how it was done.

One evening, a white feather drifted onto the deck. Collecting it, I gently puffed the feather onto the web where it stuck fast. I looked up at the gum-leaf bivouac. Her fishing leg was stretched out to one side.

I went inside and sat behind the glass doors to wait. The kookaburras sang. The mauve sky darkened. And then I saw her move.

She marched down imperiously, the web springing under her feet, directly to the feather. I stepped outside, my face centimetres from her, as she started unknitting the debris. She fiddled her legs and mouth irritably, peeling and pushing each wispy afterfeather clear of the sticky lines as though she had much better things to do with her time.

And then it happened, so suddenly that I foolishly cupped my hands. She puffed the feather clear of the web into my face. Pfff! I stood there looking at the undamaged feather in my palms. She crouched defiantly in her web.

Was she playing a game? Or sending a darker message? I stepped inside and slid the door closed. Deck Spider scuttled off, back up to her gum-leaf bivouac and the more serious business afoot.