Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [52]
Exchanging a suddenly uncertain glance, our friends complied. My wife studied the dead snake briefly before gripping it firmly at the front end. Using both hands, she then proceeded to skin it, starting at the head and working progressively downward. Both friends suddenly found themselves on the opposite side of their intended gross-out prank.
Unfortunately, JoAnn did not have time to cure the skin properly. It would have made a nice hatband, if not a belt. I was out of town and didn’t have a chance to see it. I relate this tale as a caution to any would-be burglars. I live with a woman who is part Cherokee, part Comanche, skins rattlesnakes with her bare hands, and carries a titanium switchblade.
The weaker sex, indeed.
* * *
As I mentioned earlier, we all have our specific, individual fears. JoAnn has no trouble dealing with a dead rattlesnake, and because of her upbringing she was sternly taught, and quite rightly so, to beware of live ones. She does not much care for sharks, although the likelihood of encountering a great white in the lakes bordering Prescott is pretty slim. She is also, like most folks, something of an arachnophobe. Myself, I hold the same kind of soft spot for spiders that I do for all the underdog species that frequently appear in the garish headlines of our tabloid media.
Which is a roundabout way of segueing to the day JoAnn came home to find me making friends with a tarantula.
Of all Arizona’s native predators, none has a more undeserved reputation for posing a danger to humans than the poor slandered representatives of the family Theraphosidae. Certainly tarantulas will bite if sufficiently provoked (so will an irritated five-year-old). But by and large, they are among the most serene of spiders. They cannot help how they look, nor the fact that other, smaller relatives like the black widow and the brown recluse really are dangerous. Remember what I said before: It’s always the smaller things that get you.
It was one of those early summer chamber-of-commerce days in Prescott. In the mountains of central Arizona, assorted migratory species such as hummingbirds, deer, and tourists were on the march. So, too, was the tarantula that ambled toward me as I was standing outside our front door gazing down at the creek that flows past our house. As representatives of its kind go, it was not particularly large. Nothing like the Goliath spiders of the Amazon, whose bodies are bigger than a man’s spread hand and whose outstretched legs would fit comfortably over the top of a basketball. This fuzzy eight-legged visitor could have nestled comfortably in my open palm. In the bright sunlight, I could see its twin fangs plainly, glistening as if whittled from black ivory.
I realize that this image is by itself enough to acutely unsettle the arachnophobes among you. Please be at your ease. I am not about to be bitten and run screaming, and neither are you. Think, if you must envision something spidery, of Charlotte’s Web.
The road to our property either dead-ends against our driveway or becomes our driveway, depending on how much sightseeing someone careening along it happens to be doing. As the road merges into our driveway, dirt gives way to gravel. The house itself sits on a level terrace between two sharply sloping hillsides. The downslope below the house gives way to some landscaped Arizona cypress, vinca ground cover, outcroppings of pale yellow and tan granitic rock, and below that, the creek. My study is in a room located above a detached garage.
The tarantula was in the process of migrating, or so I guessed taking into consideration the temperature, humidity, and time of year. (Unlike Wile E. Coyote might have done, it was not holding up a neatly lettered little sign reading I AM MIGRATING.) Having probably made its way upward from somewhere near the creek and then navigated through the ground-level jungle of dark-green