Ants

Ants become one of the first unsettling signs that the world left behind by humanity is not simply empty: in the city, their numbers swell until ordinary scraps of food draw armies into Ish’s home, and then the population almost vanishes. Ish cannot determine what caused either change. Their rise and disappearance instead leave him with a hard lesson in the limits of observation, and with evidence that creatures thriving amid human abundance may remain dependent on it.

A Sudden Change in Scale

Two days after the immediate problem of Dogs had occupied his attention, Ish found the Ants a more serious concern. He knew them from the old household routine: his mother’s dismay at a line in the kitchen, his father’s irritation, and the familiar question of whether to call the ant-man or handle the problem themselves. That remembered domestic nuisance became something far larger. With householders no longer fighting them in kitchens or attacking their nests, rapid breeding over the course of a few months brought their numbers to a climax. Ish thought they might also have found substantial food supplies, but he did not know what had triggered the increase.

Their expansion resisted even his attempts to make sense of it. Ish wished he had enough knowledge of entomology to reconstruct what was happening, and investigated, but could not establish whether the Ants were spreading outward from a single center or multiplying across the city at once. Their numbers were plainly immense; their origin and pattern were not. The distinction matters: the visible surge could be counted in its consequences, but its history remained beyond his understanding.

The House Under Pressure

Ant scouts appeared everywhere, and a trace of food or even a dead fly could bring an immediate stream roughly an inch wide. The Ants overwhelmed the small prey that had attracted them. They wandered over Princess’s coat like fleas, though they apparently did not bite, and turned up in Ish’s clothes. One morning he awoke from a horrible dream in which a stream crossed his cheek, moving toward a destination he could not discover. The intrusion made his own home feel less like a secure refuge than a surface continually reached by forces he could not see or direct.

The house, however, was only ground the Ants raided; Ish judged that their real strength lay outside. Their hills seemed to be everywhere, and turning over a clod brought thousands swarming from burrows in the earth. He suspected that they might be annihilating other insects or destroying those insects’ food, but this remained his inference, not something he had established. The scale also defeated ordinary household remedies. He brought home ant poison and DDT spray from a drug store and tried to make the house a hostile island. The Ants continued across the sprayed area. The intruders might die, but even millions of individual deaths would make little difference to the vast population he imagined around him.

City-Bound Abundance

Trying to estimate how many Ants lived on a single city lot, Ish arrived at a figure in the billions, so startling that he found it difficult to believe. The spectacle suggested the possibility that Ants might escape all natural limits and inherit the earth. Yet his investigations disclosed a restriction that qualified that fear: their range did not extend appreciably beyond the city. For all their apparent abundance, the Ants were not simply flourishing everywhere.

Ish concluded that they, like Dogs, Cats, and Rats, had become domestic animals dependent on human activity. He described them more precisely as parasites on humanity: their head start came from access to human food, while their circumstances had also been shaped by human presence. This was not a claim that the Ants had been tamed or that Ish understood their ecology fully. It was an interpretation of the contrast between overwhelming numbers inside the city and their limited range beyond it. Ish could have left if his sole aim had been comfort, but chose to stay, despite the discomfort, to watch what was happening.

Vanishing and Uncertainty

One morning Ish suddenly realized that he had not noticed any Ants. He searched for their scouts, then dropped a bit of food on the floor and left it for several minutes. When he returned, it remained untouched. Outside, a turned clod no longer released a swarm. Careful searching found only a few scattered individuals, so few that he could have counted them one by one; he found no bodies. The change was nearly as abrupt as the earlier increase, but its cause was hidden. He thought that a more knowledgeable observer might have dug down to discover billions dead in their nests, yet he could not investigate in that way and never solved the mystery.

Ish suspected that an explosive population concentration had brought its own check. The Ants might have consumed the food that had supported their rise; more likely, he thought, disease had struck them. In the following days he thought he detected a faint, pervasive smell of decay, as if billions of bodies were breaking down, but this did not resolve what had happened. The absence of visible remains left his explanation plausible rather than certain.

Ecological Significance

The disappearance stayed with Ish. Later, when considering whether Rats might also take over after humanity’s departure, he recalled that the Ants had vanished almost overnight and hoped for a comparable reversal. He reasoned that populations growing too numerous could be checked by a plague, and the analogy helped him frame the danger of a Rat population sustained by city food supplies. But the Ants’ own fate never became a confirmed diagnosis: their cause of collapse remained unknown, while the connection between abundance and vulnerability remained Ish’s inference.

Their episode gives the post-human environment a shape more complicated than a simple transfer of dominance from people to animals. Ants can fill a house, overwhelm its defenses, and seem bound for limitless expansion; the same apparent triumph may conceal dependence on conditions that cannot last. Their disappearance does not restore Ish’s control or deliver a scientific answer. Instead, the episode records both the force of nonhuman life and the limits of a human observer trying to understand it.