The Farm With No Farmer

The green river had been crossing the trail for a while before either of them said anything about it.

It was not water. It was leaves. Little half-moons of leaf, each one held up over the back of an ant, floating along a bare path in the dirt like a parade of sails. The tour guide had already gone around the next bend, saying the words leafcutter ants over her shoulder the way you say the name of a bird you have seen too many times to stop for.

Maya sat down in the mud. Soren crouched next to her.

"They're all going the same way," she said.

"Some are going back empty," said Soren. He had his notebook out and was drawing the path, two lanes, loaded ants one direction, empty ants the other. "It's a road."

"Where does the road go?"

They followed it. Uphill it climbed a small tree and vanished into the canopy where the cutting was. Downhill it ran to a low mound of loose earth with a dark hole in the middle. Every leaf on the whole road was pointed at that hole.

"So they eat the leaves down there," Maya said.

"Watch the small one." Soren pointed. On the back of one leaf, riding it like a tiny passenger, was an ant much smaller than the carrier. "Why is she getting a lift?"

"Free ride?"

"Ants don't do free rides."

Maya leaned so close her nose nearly touched the road. The little ants were on lots of the leaves now that she looked. Sitting, guarding, doing something.

"Okay," she said. "They carry the leaves in. If they ate the leaves, they'd just eat the leaves up in the tree. Why carry them all the way down a hole?"

Soren stopped drawing. "Maybe they can't eat them."

"They're cutting them all day."

"Cutting isn't eating." He said it slowly, checking it as it came out. "My mom cuts up things I still won't eat."

Maya laughed, then stopped laughing. "Then who's the leaves for?"

That sat between them. Below, a fresh ant reached the hole with its green sail and disappeared into the dark, and did not come back with it.

"Something down there needs the leaves," Maya said. "Something that can't come up and get them itself."

"Another animal?"

"Then it'd be a pet. That's a lot of work for a pet." She was frowning now. "They cut leaves. They carry leaves. They protect the leaves." She looked at the little rider ant. "They guard the leaves like they're worth something. But not to eat. To keep."

"To grow something on," Soren said.

He had not planned to say it. It arrived and he said it, and then he looked at his own words on the page and got very careful.

"Leaves rot," he said. "In here everything rots fast, it's warm and wet, you can smell it. Something grows on rotting leaves. Mold. Fungus." He tapped the notebook. "They're not carrying food in. They're carrying food for the food."

Maya sat all the way up. "They're farming."

"Down a hole. In the dark."

"They cut the field and haul it home and feed it to a fungus and eat the fungus." She was talking fast now, hands moving. "The little one rides down to weed it. That's a weeder. You don't put a guard on a leaf. You put a guard on a garden."

A man on the tour had come back looking for them. He crouched down, friendly, phone out to take a picture of the ants. "Amazing little guys," he said. "They eat leaves. Whole forests of it."

"They don't eat the leaves," Maya said, not to be rude, just because it was true.

The man smiled the smile adults use when they have decided a child is being charming. "Sure they do. Leafcutters."

"They can't," said Soren. "Look how many they carry in and none come back out. It's going somewhere. It's going onto something." He held up the notebook, the two-lane road, the hole, the arrow pointing down into the dark. The man looked at it, and looked at the ants, and the smile changed a little, into something less certain and more interested, and he did not say anything else. He took his picture and went back to tell the guide the kids were fine.

Maya watched the fresh leaves go down. "How long do you think they've been doing this?"

"Since before they figured it out," Soren said. "I mean, nobody figured it out. There's no first ant who invented farming."

"There's no ant school."

"So it's just, the ants that grew the fungus lived, and the ones that didn't, didn't, for however long that takes." He wrote a number in the notebook and then crossed it out because he did not know it. "Longer than people. Way longer than people. People have been farming for what, ten thousand years?"

"And these were already down there," Maya said.

"Millions of years before there was a person to be first at anything."

They both looked at the hole then. The idea of it was doing something to the size of the day.

"Here's the part I can't put down," Maya said quietly. "The fungus. Where does it grow, besides down there?"

Soren thought about it. "Nowhere?"

"That's what I mean. If the ants only carry it, and they never let it out, and they've had it for millions of years." She stopped. "It doesn't live anywhere else. It can't. There's no wild version. It only exists because they keep it."

"And they only exist because it feeds them."

"Neither one can quit." Maya's voice had gone almost to nothing. "Two whole living things that made a deal so long ago that now they're just, stuck being each other's whole world. And it's happening right now. Under my shoe."

Soren did not write that down. He just held the notebook open on his knees and watched.

A loaded ant reached the edge of the hole, tipped its green sail forward, and went down into the farm nobody up here would ever see, where a thing that grew nowhere else in the world was waiting to be fed.