journeys

"Stop, was that a snake back there?" Murray our holiday escort shouted.

The car came to a halt as we all jumped out from our 4WD to feed our curiousity.

The five of us backtracked some 3 meters and came upon the snake. Or what looked like a snake. I squatted on the dusty Australian outback ground and gazed in disbelief. Our so called snake turned out to be some 240 caterpillars (Murray counted) crawling one after another in a line. A whole colony of them were making their journey across the the salty sandy grounds once covered by ocean water some 5 million years ago.

Where did the caterpillars come from and where were they going? We didn't know. And in all likelihood, they didn't either. As an outsider looking in on those caterpillars... I registered their smallness in the presence of the open lands surrounding us. I looked ahead of them and saw that they had a huge open space before them. But for those tiny little hairy creatures they could not see beyond the samphires or spinifex trees less than a meter before them. at some point though, at a different life stage they will be given new eyes as they spread their butterfly wings and take flight.