In a short time the representatives from the two colonies appeared to dance with one another. The ants were not performing in any human sense, however. They had come here instead to conduct a tournament between colonies. The scouts were gathering information that allowed them to assess the strength of the opposing Trailhead Colony. They could use this information and simultaneously advertise their own strength to the enemy without risk of death or injury. The dance, in short, was not that, but a highly formalized probe and communication that reinforced the security of the two colonies.
At the time of this day's tournament, the Streamside Colony was at its peak as a superorganism. It was strong enough to challenge any neighboring colony, and especially the declining Trailhead Colony. The Streamside Queen was only six years old, the equivalent of thirty years in a human life-span. She was in her prime, bursting with eggs, and she reeked of sweet-smelling royal pheromone. Her colony's nest was on firm, productive ground at the edge of an undisturbed patch of deciduous scrub woodland. Close by in the woods a small stream gave the nest protection on one side. On the other side a miniature ravine dropped away, too steep to harbor nests of potential rivals. The Streamsiders had not chosen this site for their own protection. They were just lucky that their mother Queen had landed there.
As the Streamsider scouts gathered in the arena, they found their Trailheader counterparts also assembling in almost equal numbers. A few had climbed up on the tops of pebbles to serve as sentinels. The first scouts on both sides to encounter the enemy ran home to recruit reinforcements. They laid odor trails to excite and guide their nestmates, and they carried faint smears of the enemy odor on their own body surface to identify the opposition. Within an hour hundreds of ants from both colonies were milling around one another. The original scouts, all of whom were relatively small and thin, were soon joined by contingents of the more massively built soldiers.
The opposing forces were careful not to start a battle. Their strategy was the opposite: the displays were the equivalent of competing military parades by human armies. They wanted their performance to be viewed by the enemy.
As the tournament unfolded, the individual performers made themselves appear as large as possible. They inflated their abdomens by pumping them up with fluid. They straightened their legs to form stilts and strutted around every foreign worker they encountered--sometimes bumping against them. Still others climbed up and posed on top of pebbles, exaggerating their size still more. They never threatened to attack. The effort they were making was meant to persuade the other side that their colony had a great many soldiers. A few small workers served as counters, not engaged in displays themselves but moving about among the crowds of performing workers in order to gain an estimate of the size of the soldier force. The larger the enemy force, the more intense the effort the counters made to attract others to the tournament. A weakness in their recruiting effort was a signal to the other side of that colony's weakness. It was an unintended encouraging clue for the opposing colony.
Even before the death of the Trailhead Queen, and increasingly now that she was gone, the military pomp of the Trailhead Colony had become noticeably less impressive. Gradually and carefully over a period of a week, led by signals from the elite scout and several of her nestmates, the Trailheaders pulled back from the first territorial boundary. They tried to start tournaments closer to home, where their soldiers together with the make-believe soldiers among the smaller ants who filled out the force could be called to the field more quickly. But this tactic did not fool the elite Streamsider scout and her frontline nestmates on the other side, who pushed even harder and mounted increasingly conspicuous displays. There was nothing the Trailheaders could do but continue to pull back, day after day, thereby ceding some of their foraging territory.
Still, the retreat was not by itself a defeat. There was a chance that the Trailhead Colony might eke out a victory, or at least force a draw. The reason was that as the tournament arena moved closer to their nest, the defenders were able to reach the arena more quickly. They could draw out whatever reinforcements were available on a minute-by-minute basis. The Streamsiders were forced, on the other hand, to accept