I, Big George, do solemnly swear that on the second of July I captured my first bug. The reader should be reminded that in the jungle many sounds occur which it is impossible to account for; so that on hearing a sudden crash or wail or plea ahead, the only thing to do is shoot immediately. POW! WHAM! ZAP! The Americans followed the same rule when they were dealing with Che Guevara and his band. The subversives had their camp in the middle of the jungle, and it was night, a particularly dangerous time to go hunting — shit, NATO might lose some boys. So the searchers flew over the area in silent reconnaissance planes, located the glow of the tiny campstove on their infrared scanners from ten miles away, dropped a few hundred paratroopers with cocked submachine guns, surrounded the camp, and then unfortunately Che or perhaps somebody else made a funny noise and all the Green Berets were forced to open fire. The succeeding stillness tended no doubt only to heighten the unpleasant impression which had already been made. — The first thing, then, which claimed my attention as I entered the forest with my 12-gauge shotgun, was an interminable sound of breaking branches, as if some great multilegged carapaced thing were struggling among the rubber-trees. It could not be a scout tank, for I glimpsed feelers and a broad curvature of deep gunmetal blue. It was scrambling behind a fallen tree when I fired. I missed the first time, and was forced to shoot again as it emerged. This time I hit it right in the back with a full load of pellets. It fell over on its side, kicking. I ran up and threw my shirt over its head (such as it had a head) and tied its mandibles shut with baling wire. Thus rendered innocuous, it could not harm me when I strapped it to a sapling to dig the bullets out of it. The operation was a success. I dragged it back to our camp and put it in a monkey-cage with a saucer of milk and a freshly killed rabbit to comfort it. When the metal affair arrived from Lima, we transferred it to that and gave it a slate to write with. Comrade Pablo taught it our alphabet.
As the bug — which seemed to be a beetle of some kind — recovered, it came to evince so fond and loving a disposition for me that I decided to bring it back to the United States when I returned. We quickly learned to communicate with each other, for it was a very intelligent bug and understood that it could never escape and would be severely treated if it did not make a good-faith effort to obey my instructions.
According to von Fritsch, the language of bees consists of signs like that of our poor dumb and deaf population; and different varieties have different languages, “perhaps as far apart as French and German.” These beetles have apparently established an insect Esperanto which must come in quite handy for instinctive aggression. Being no linguist, I insisted that my prisoner speak English. The conversations took place in a small hut kept at my disposal.
“What are your true aims?” I asked. “Are you fighting against reaction or the human race as a whole?”
It waggled its feelers. “You hurt,” it wrote, “beetle hurt, you kill and we die you…”
“Will you become our shock troops against the reactionaries?”
“You feed us, no hurt, and we do for you…”
“What is the composition of your Central Committee?” I asked, my spectacles flashing with excitement.
“Great Beetle hurt when we hurt, fight electricity make you die…”
“And do you think that the Great Beetle will agree to bolster our forces?”
“Hurt all beetles, we burrow click and pinch, we hurt, certainly sir make you die…”
William T. Vollmann, You Bright and Risen Angels
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