That is why the spiders neither saw nor heard him coming.

The web is torn loose and is wrapped around a frenzied moving haystack, and a huge piece of raw-but-painted meat is making a sound the spider never heard before: "AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!"

He lies mute, hearing only in the tactile way that a spider hears, touching the threads of the web with long extended fingertips and listening.

Although spiders and insects hear the world in a very different way from us, they are sampling the same sounds carried through the air.

I whispered, as though the spider could hear.