The cellar spider of the Vessermas hills spins silk that stays warm. Not sun-on-a-wall warm: closer to a loaf an hour out of the oven, and it holds that heat as long as the spider lives. On frozen mornings the webs give off a thin steam, and cellar doors in the district look as though the house is breathing out. This is the most useful thing about the animal and the cause of nearly every quarrel in the valley. It eats wool moths, cellar crickets and the fleas that ride the mice, and what remains under each web is a gray drift of husks, light enough to blow along the floor.
Ordway Fenn, who runs the cooper's yard at Vessermas, hangs a web above each apprentice's cot from November and says nobody under his roof has had chilblains in nine winters. Orsolya Tane, a widow at Kitterin on the far side of the ridge, says the silk lends nothing. It takes warmth from whoever sleeps beneath it, she says, and she has lifted children out of webbed beds stiff with cold at dawn. Each can name a household that proves the point. They have argued it across a trestle at the Candle Fair for years.
I took a glass thermometer into the Fenn cellar and pushed the bulb into a hank of web the size of a fist, then hung a second thermometer in open air a yard away. After ten minutes the air read 41 degrees and the web read 97. I repeated the test over a cot, one thermometer inside the blanket under a web and another in a bare cot beside it. The blankets read the same, within a degree. The warmth is the spider's own. It passes none to the sleeper and takes none from him. Fenn's apprentices are healthy because the webs eat the moths that ruin blankets, and because Fenn feeds them. Mrs. Tane's children woke cold because it was January.
When I first came through, the Kitterin webs were gray, as at Vessermas. This year they are the color of weak tea. The households there have taken to wiping doorframes and bedposts with cut onion to keep the spiders out of the bedrooms, and the spiders have gone up to the kitchen rafters, where chimney smoke stains their silk. They are no less warm. A smoked web smells faintly of ham, and Fenn thinks the smoke has improved them. Both villages give the same instruction. Never take a web down on a frozen night. Wait for the thaw, lift it off on a wooden spoon, and carry it outdoors before you let go.
- Classification
- Hearth-silk cellar arachnid
- Habitat
- Cellars, chimney rafters, root stores
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 14 inch leg span, fig-sized body
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Vessermas hills and Kitterin ridge
- Binomial
- Arachnia calidaria
- Diet
- Wool moths, crickets, mouse fleas
- Temperament
- Shy, fiercely territorial about its web