ATTACKED BY ANTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19807, 30 November 1927, Page 18

ATTACKED BY ANTS.

M EIGHT HOURS' ORDEAL. ALONE IN THE BUSH. MAN'S EXPERIENCES. DISCOVERY BY SEARCH PARTY. [FROM OUR p\VN CORRESPONDENT.] SYDNF.S. Nov. 25 In one of Bex Bench'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 bo true. Yet fiction has been converted to fact, with the exception that death was r.ot the price paid bv the victim, by a case reported from the. Charters Towers district in Queensland. So seriously injured that ho was unable to escape swarms of ants that attacked him, Mr. Joseph Cantys, a young stockTnan, lay for eight hours exposed to the glare of a blazing, 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 somo scrub when tho horse ho was riding crashed into a tree. Tho stockman was thrown on to his head, and suffered severe head wounds, a broken thigh, and abrasions. lie was vendered unconscious, and when ho 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 unconsciousness. 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. Cantys' horse returned riderless, lie was completely exhausted. The unfortunate stockman was brought to Charters lowers Hospital, where tho 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 tho flesh from his bones, but other kinds would not have touched him unless he had been killed. These discern between liv:.ng 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. He was proved to have been on their nest a much shorter period than Mr. Cantys v.as.