The forest is slowly reclaiming the village that once overlooked Chek Jawa. The villagers are gone now, dwelling on the mainland or making a living ferrying overladen visitors to their former homesteads. The old wells that supplied water are now covered with netting. Few signs of settlement are now visible, save the odd clearing overgrown with secondary vegetation and the family of gravestones that greet strollers to the boardwalk. The fruit trees – durians, rambutans, mangosteens, jackfruit, mangos, bananas, starfruit, and lesser bodies of interest only to the birds and the bees – remain to provide shade over the trail and fodder for men to reminisce their youth when the harvest of the earth grew in abundance on soils now filled with flats and factories.
The builders here have no need to destroy or dismantle the terrain, for they engineer their homes of protein to bind not bulldoze the surrounding matrix of living branches. Not once we blundered through the frames of invisible silk that cut across the path with lethal intent. Sitting in their hubs, the makers crouch with legs withdrawn to conceal the tell-tale silhouettes of soft-bodied traps. Some have bodies like stiff shells, so hard and heavy that the owner can barely support herself on mite-sized legs and appears more at home dangling topsy-turvy from her open orb. One of her neighbours is similarly unflattering in shape, resembling a shiny red pear streaked with black and gold.
Web-building spiders usually have eyes so tiny one can barely make them out on faces armed with piercing jaws. The Salticids that hunt by day sport prettier peepers and have few qualms at staring down rude ducks in their domain. Not the only one who landed on my hide but the boldest, a female Viciria praemandibularis descended on my duck, leaping from leaf to hood to lens to flash. Defying my attempts to fob her off onto furrier creatures, she inspected with disdainful eyes the hairy lawn of my forearm, brandishing fangs close to sensitive skin. Her arsenal pales though in comparison with the mammoth chelicerae of this ant-mimic, which strutted and paced on a catwalk of green, taunting fat fowl with a slim view of waisted opportunities.
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