ATTACKED BY ANTS

Greymouth Evening Star, 10 December 1927, Page 12

ATTACKED BY ANTS

AN EIGHT HOURS’ ORDEAL. In one of Rex Beach’s works of fiction, the villain meets with the terrible fate of being eaten to death by ants That passage never fails to produce a shudder in the reader, and perhaps a feeling that it was too awful to be true. Yet fiction has been converted to fact, with the exception that death was not the price paid by the victim, by a case reported from the Charters Towers district in Queensland. So seriously injured that he was unable to escape swarms of ants that attacked him, Mr. Joseph Cantys, a young stockman, lay for eight hours exposed to the glare of a biazing, pitiless sun before he was discovered by a search party. Mr. Cantys, the head stockman of a large cattle station, had been out mustering stock. He was galloping through some scrub when the horse he was riding crashed into a tree. The stockman was thrown on to his head, and suffered severe head wounds, a broken thigh, and abrasions. He was rendered unconscious, and when he regained his senses, he found that swarms of ants, attracted by the blood from his wounds, were attacking him. The disabled stockman attempted to hunt the insects off. but the effort was too much and he again lapsed into tinconsciousness. For hours he lay there, and during brief periods of consciousness endeavoured to free himself. When he was finally discovered by the search party from the station, which set out when Mr. Canty’s horse returned riderless, he was completely exhausted. The unfortunate stockman was brought to Charters Towers Hospital, where the tough constitution that the hard life of a Queensland stockman engenders, helped him quickly to regain the road to health and strength. Mr. Cantys must have been lucky in not encountering the most vicious of Australia’s meat-eating ants. Eight hours would have sufficed several species to clean all the flesh from his bones, but other kinds would not have touched him unless he had been killed. These discern between living flesh and the dead. Not so many months ago an old-age pensioner, who stumbled and became unconscious in the bush not far from Sydney, was so badly eaten by ants that he died. Ho was proved to have been on their nest a much shorter period than Mr. Cantys was.