By Carl Stephenson
What a strange, yet horribly tragic story, (we read it for language arts class). It’s about this guy named Leiningen who owns a plantation in Brazil. He gets word that there’s a huge horde of ants coming toward the plantation–two miles wide and ten miles long. The District Commissioner
warns him that he must leave and take all his workers with him. But Leiningen figures that he’s smart and that he can take control of his fate by conquering the ants.
It’s an amazing tale. The author did well in describing how the ants worked–they really are intelligent. They made boats out of leaves, and they built a dam. I remember seeing on the Discovery Channel those big ants with incisors and snapping jaws, and how they could strip a stag of its flesh clear down to the bone in only minutes–six according to Stephenson’s novella.
My skin crawled as I was reading it. I kept slapping at my legs!
Leiningen was bull-headed, brave, and fool-hardy, imo. He thought he could defeat nature and the ants. I guess he did, and he did make a run for the dam to release the river to save his men, and nearly got eaten by the ants.
But he lost at least two men–peons is what the author called them. Ugh. How demeaning. It was written in 1962. I didn’t realize they called Brazilians, peons. Not very nice. Anyway, sad that the plantation owner felt he could sacrifice his men for the ants, and they didn’t even save the plantation. Too, I couldn’t help but notice how the author compared women to oxen!
Here it is if you want to read it, a classic short story:
Here is the practice test you can, well, practice on before you take the real test for a grade.
