The Ant’s Chance
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 13, 2014

My kitchen has become disputed territory. My enemy has drawn its battle lines around the sink. Each morning we meet at dawn, those ants and I. As I pad bleary-eyed towards the kettle, there they are: a black trail advancing upon my benchtop. A swarm of the blighters besieges a lone shortbread crumb.

Two lines of foot soldiers weave unsteadily between the crumb and the window sill, one coming, one going. I note there are twice as many ants as yesterday and feel a surge of annoyance. I watch three scouts march under the coffee machine and emerge next to the toaster, visibly excited by their discovery of a burnt sultana.

I lean over the six-legged troops, flick the kettle on and reach for a teabag. Sensing impending doom, the ants break ranks, abandon their trophies and scatter. I’m barely awake but already I’m plunged into the day’s existential crisis: will I launch a Mortein blitzkrieg or spare my antagonists?

By the time I’ve fetched the milk from the fridge, the ants are in retreat. They take turns slipping into a dark crack in the wall where the splashback meets the benchtop. Within minutes, all but a few stragglers have disappeared. My benchtop will be no Waterloo today.

Don’t get me wrong. I quite like ants. I like stepping over them on the footpath as they make hillocks in the sandy gaps between the slabs. I like the big ones behind glass in museums, pinned to a mounting board. But when I find ants scavenging in my kitchen I dispense death on impulse. Afterwards, I feel a little throb of remorse. Shakespeare said: Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge. Do my ants deserve to die?

I know that in my 47 years on the planet, I have killed scads of harmless insects with my big, dumb, blundering existence. I pay no mind to the countless bugs who’ve slammed against my car windscreen, leaving a smear no bigger than a raindrop as their epitaph.

I’ll happily smash a blowfly or flatten a mosquito and enjoy the victory. I’m grateful for every cockroach corpse.

And yet I play favourites. I’m a fan of spiders. Spiders eat flies. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The man of the house has talent – he can shuffle a live Huntsman onto a sheet of newspaper and slide him out the back door. Daddy-long-legs, no matter how long-legged, are welcome to hang their webs from our cornices. I could never kill a cute lawn beetle or an orange ladybird in stylish polka dots. My children know to rush a leaf raft to any bee flailing in our pool. But ants? Does an invasion of ants warrant a massacre?

On the morning of the ants’ first insurgency, I found several dozen of them mobbing a spilled sardine-shaped biscuit from the cat’s bowl. I swept them to their deaths with a wet paper towel. The next morning, the tribe had trebled its presence. I sucked every last one up the vacuum cleaner and felt smug. On the third day, I awoke to a plague of them.

I bought Borax, mixed it with sugar and lured the ants to my honey trap. I don’t know whose nest they took that Borax to, but it wasn’t theirs. So I called a truce to our war of attrition and tried diversionary tactics instead.

Mum suggested I sprinkle spent coffee grounds along their trail around the sink. But they forged a new track around the hotplate. I wiped down my kitchen bench with vinegar. They congregated on a wooden spoon. I blocked up all the cracks in the tiles with squirts of talcum powder and for two days, we were ant-free. “They’re back!” shouted my daughter the next morning, and pointed to a black conga line snaking out from under the fridge. By now, even the cat was getting antsy.

Perhaps I should convert to Buddhism and practice non-violence towards all living creatures. I’ll carry a broom with me for sweeping aside even the smallest insects from my path. But do the Buddhists know about Ross River Virus? Have they ever felt the sting of a March fly or been attacked by a wasp?

Last summer, the big Cape Lilac tree in our laneway spawned a poolside infestation of hairy black caterpillars. At first, we let them be. But they reproduced in such plague proportions that the kids and I felt nauseous from the constant squishing underfoot. The council sent in their exterminator and poisoned them. I didn’t feel one pang of guilt.

But I’m feeling sorry for my ants – they work long hours for little reward. I count myself lucky no-one’s looking down on me as insignificant and disposable. I should tolerate these harmless creatures a while longer. It’s Christmas, after all.