Day 31: cavernous

Day 31:

While attempting to seal up the back entrance to my cave house, I came across a small vein of iron ore. When I dug that out, I discovered a sizable cavern containing more ore.

And a pony-sized spider. How it got in there I don’t know. There certainly weren’t any holes for it to climb into. My best guess — and it’s totally a guess — is that the spider crawled into a cave opening and then there was a wall collapse or something. Either that or it was born there, but if it was born there how the heck did it grow to the size of a pony with no food?

As if that wasn’t weird enough, the spider was perfectly friendly and happy that I let it out of the cavern for about a half hour… then it decided to try to eat me. I don’t know if it just took that long for the pony spider neurons to determine that I was edible, or if I was getting some kind of pony spider grace period for freeing it.

I smashed it over the head with a shovel. I’m still not happy about killing the local fauna especially since The Company frowns on it so heavily. On the other hand, if the pony spider is going to try to eat me, I think surviving is the priority.

Black and white hand-drawn map of the location of the spider. From left to right shows the author's cave, a few empty caverns, the cavern with the 2nd entrance of the cave, then a cavern labelled "granite" with a spider in it. In the background, some hills, in the foreground a lake.
Surprise spider location