by Gordon Grice
The fourth tarantula I’d brought home that rainy night was the only male. We called him Raoul. His behavior wasn’t like the females’. If I prodded Harriet with a pencil, she would move off a few leisurely paces. If I prodded Raoul, he would run six frenzied laps around his container.
One day Raoul spun out a rectangular sheet of web. It was about the size of his own body. He lay on it with his belly pressed to the silk, bouncing and trembling. Then he rose and applied his palps to the droplets that had oozed from the pore in the forward part of his abdomen. His palps swelled at the tips. The male tarantula uses the palps, which aren’t connected to the gonads, to copulate. Until humans invented artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization, only two animals used such a two-stage sexual system—the spider and an insect called the mantidfly.
Raoul circled his container slowly, as if afraid to bump into anything, his gait different from before, eager but somehow delicate. It was such a change from his former hyperactivity that I felt vaguely embarrassed to watch him.
A female tarantula takes a decade or so to mature; then she can mate every year for the rest of her life. She can live to the age of twenty or thirty. A male spends his decade growing up, gets a few days in autumn to find a mate, and then, successful or not, he dies. I decided to give Raoul the same chance he’d have in the wild. I put him into Harriet’s terrarium.
They met at what used to be the dog’s nose. Harriet flinched and took a step back. (“Egad! A tarantula!” Tracy said, guessing at Harriet’s first impression of her suitor.) In the wild, a male has to stomp around outside a female’s den acting like prey so she’ll come out. Here, however, Raoul could proceed with the tapping of Harriet’s forelegs. The tapping forms a code, particular to a species, which seems to translate as “Please don’t eat me.” It is not terribly uncommon for the female to ignore this request.
Harriet reared up on her hind legs to expose her fangs. Raoul reared up to meet her. They wrestled, just as Harriet and the stubby-legged female had a few days before. The difference this time was Raoul’s thumbs.
The male tarantula’s thumbs appear with his final molt, the one that makes him an adult. They project from the knees of his forelegs. I had hardly noticed these little spurs on Raoul, but now they came into play. He neatly hooked one thumb into each of Harriet’s fangs, so that his long front legs leveraged the fangs apart. He was safe for the moment. He pushed her back until she was almost vertical; then he plugged one of his clubby palps into her belly. They stood still in this position for several minutes. Then he pulled away and exploded into a flurry of legs, bouncing off the ground repeatedly in his hurry to escape. Gone was the awkward gait of his mate-hunting phase; returned was his hyperactive paranoia. He ran straight up the glass wall and cowered in a high corner. Harriet strolled off, looking a little irritable, but she showed no further interest in Raoul. This fact did not persuade him to descend. He stayed there all day and all night, pressing himself into the smallest possible volume.
Raoul had mated and would soon die. Prima, languishing in captivity, would have no opportunity to mate. Harriet would soon produce an egg sac, and then the problem of caring for many tiny tarantulas would descend on me. Tracy and I were about to move to a new city, and I decided the best move would be to free the tarantulas. I released them in a grassy field. I like to think that field is pocked with the burrows of their descendants.
Every few years I get the tarantula itch. It’s hard to find the females, but the males are easier. All I have to do is pay attention as I drive highways in the summer. I notice where I see a tarantula. Then, in the last few autumn days before the first freeze (which tarantulas predict more accurately than human forecasters do), I visit these spots. The males who haven’t mated yet are desperate by now. They cross the highways in search of females. Sometimes the road is dappled with their crushed bodies.
I cruise these spots at sundown, watching for the eerie gait of the tarantula. If I can stop safely, I get out and stand on the shoulder to meet the wanderers. I usually catch them in baby-formula cans, shooing them in with the lids. These males, who would die in the freeze, can live a few weeks longer indoors. As I drive home, I can hear the spiders scratching their tin prisons on the seat next to me.
Acquaintances of mine who often drive Highway 160 call the part east of Meade, Kansas, “the Stretch,” because it is a desolate, boring road. The towns are small and thirty miles apart. There are a few places where water has gouged wicked scars on the red earth, but otherwise the view is all field, fence, cattle, open sky, and asphalt, occasionally interrupted by a steep hill or a tight turn. To drive that road is to stretch your patience, or your ability to stay alert. Everyone speeds through.
Driving from the east, one couple was nearing the end of the Stretch. As they came to a bridge near Meade, they saw something that cured their boredom.
“It must have been this big,” the woman said, holding her hands in a circle eight inches in diameter. She claimed the tarantula was far bigger than any other she’d ever seen, so big it made her nauseous. She felt conflicting urges to ask her husband to swerve and kill it, or make sure the car didn’t touch it. When they had passed she saw the tarantula in the side mirror. It was striding off the road just beside the bridge.
She said she had no love of spiders, but had never had such a visceral reaction to one before, even to another tarantula. “It was the size,” she emphasized. Her husband nodded vigorously as if to underscore her remark.
Of course, I doubt the monster exists. Maybe weariness and surprise enlarged the spider in my informants’ perceptions. But it’s possible. Something about the psychology of the woman’s reaction strikes me as authentic. That primal arachnophobia most of us have a bit of emerges in direct proportion to the size of the spider.
I covet that tarantula. Others have told me their stories of tarantulas on the Stretch. The creatures, they say, are plentiful and large there. I can vouch for the abundance. I have spent autumn evenings cruising that road, my eyes scanning the asphalt for the distinctive rippling movement that is the walk of the tarantula, a movement only slightly different from that of a maple leaf pushed along by wind. I have seen tarantulas on the Stretch, and, on rare occasions when there’s no traffic on the shoulderless road, I’ve stopped the car to capture one, typically a male with a leg span of about five inches.
But I’ve never seen the huge tarantula. It would have to be a female to get that big, so maybe it’s still alive these several years later. Sometimes I park near the bridge and walk along the creek it spans, gazing down the steep bank into the dark deepening with evening, and I hope for a monster.
PIG
A hot place, the abundant foliage moist and gleaming like emeralds in the morning sun; deep humid shadows; at a little distance in any direction, visible wisps of steam navigating sinuously among the fronds of palm and fern. Blunt-winged butterflies the color of ripe cantaloupe flesh fumble drunkenly at massive flowers. Something larger is moving: a bird picks its way over the mossy ground, its massy hindquarters bobbing with its gait. It is like no bird you have seen, a sort of drab, bloated dove with useless, stunted wings and a buzzard’s hooked beak. Its frame is thick-muscled, its walk odd but hardly the clumsy stumble we have always read about.
Out of the undergrowth lunges a bigger animal, four-footed, dark-furred, with a high, ridged back and a long snout not unlike a rat’s. But this is no rodent. When it has seized the bird in its mouth, its forward momentum stops, and you can see that it’s a pig. Perhaps you’re surprised by its lean build; perhaps the snout seems unnaturally long—it tapers in and then flares out again before ending in a flat, cartilaginous disk of a nose. At the moment, however, what you notice most is the set of tusks curving out around the snout, which the pig, with short twitches of the head, is using to gut the panicking bird. The small wings beat futilely; the bird’s bright black eyes dart around and then become still. The pig is already headed into the sheltering green with his meal.
This was a t
ypical death for a dodo. A fast runner, the bird was crippled by a trait common among animals that evolve on islands without predators: it had no fear of strangers. It died as hundreds of other island animals have, hunted down by predators whose standard of brutality was beyond their experience.
The dodo, a relative of the dove, died out about three hundred years ago—it’s hard to be exact because no one noticed it at the time. The reason for its extinction is complicated. Most people think human predation killed off the dodo, but that’s only part of the story. The dodo actually succumbed to competition and predation by a half-dozen or so invaders of its isolated habitat. Though none of these animals springs to mind when you hear the word predator, together they precipitated a dodo apocalypse. The culprits, which all arrived on ships, were the goat, cat, rat, monkey, human, dog, and pig.
Goats gobbled up the fallen fruit dodos liked to eat; they were competitors. The rest hurt the birds more directly. Contrary to legend, the dodos were graceful runners and could deliver a painful bite, and there’s one recorded instance of a man venturing near a nesting site and receiving a sound pecking from a gang of dodos. But these fighting and running skills didn’t go far enough to protect the dodo’s eggs and young from sneaking predators like cats and rats. In his recent book The Song of the Dodo, David Quammen presents good evidence the macaque monkeys that had already invaded Mauritius three hundred years ago are even today pressuring a certain endangered kestrel species by eating its eggs. The kestrel makes its nest in cliffs; the dodo’s nest, lying on open ground, would have been an easier target for the macaques. (Don’t ask why somebody brought monkeys to Mauritius; nobody knows.)
Humans shot the big birds or simply ran them down like barnyard chickens. Their bodies were so packed with edible meat that crews could provision their ships by gathering dodos for a few hours. Dogs, like rats, ate the eggs, which were bigger than those of geese. The dogs delighted in killing the adults as well.
The pigs on the islands were introduced in the hopes that they would establish a self-supporting wild population. Then they could be hunted by settlers and the crews of passing ships. The pigs roamed free, grazing and rooting for food. They were captured only for slaughter. The wild population took hold as planned. This success is hardly shocking, since the “European” wild boar has established branch offices everywhere from the East Indies to West Virginia.
A wild pig is quite a different animal than a captive one, and the captive pigs of today are much different than any, wild or captive, that lived three hundred years ago. A wild pig, even when well fed, looks lean and razorbacked. It’s long-snouted and hirsute. It rides high on thin legs. It has a set of tusks perfect for eviscerating other animals. Domestic pigs have tusks too, but most farmers trim them for safety reasons.
The tusks can amputate a human limb. Once, a friend of mine helped two friends trying to restrain a huge domestic boar so that its tusks could be cut. To control a pig, you put a loop of wire around its sensitive rooter (the flat disk at the end of its snout) and pull up. The pig holds still for fear of hurting himself. This boar caught on to the plan and tossed the men aside, refusing to let his nose be wired. One of the men decided to knock the boar unconscious so they could get on with the clipping. He swung a two-by-four at the boar’s head. The boar bit it in half in midswing. The men apologized and left the pen.
Pigs are omnivorous, living on nuts, roots, fruit, grain, bark, and carrion. They even eat chunks of coal, crunching it like hard candy. They also prey on live animals. Their menu of common prey items includes insects, frogs, lizards, snakes (even rattlesnakes), rodents, and lambs, but they will try almost anything, including fish and crabs and large land animals. In Argentina, where the boars get especially large, they prey on domestic rams.
Pigs were probably the most damaging predators for the dodo population. They were big and fast enough to hunt down the adults, but they would also have taken an omnivorous interest in the eggs and young. They had keener noses than humans and could hunt dodos even in the jungled parts of the island. Unlike dogs, they didn’t stay near human habitations; they avoided humans. They could strike anywhere. For a flightless bird that had never seen predators before, the pig was catastrophic.
The dodo holds a peculiar place in Western consciousness. It was the first animal we realized had become extinct in historical times. We understand it as an emblem of extinction, but few of us know anything else about it. For example, most Americans think the dodo was Australian, though it actually lived on the island of Mauritius.
The dodo is our emblem of extinction, but the myths that have grown around its demise are revealing. We have painted the dodo as a clumsy, freakish creature that deserved to die out—a myth so important to our idea of evolution-as-competition that it’s taught as fact to schoolchildren, so pervasive the bird’s name is a synonym for fool. It’s as if we must find deserving losers in the competition. This myth is probably a salve for our collective guilt about the way we treat the world around us, destroying other living things through our clumsy greed.
Paradoxically, the competing explanation, in which humans bear full responsibility for the extinction, is yet another bit of arrogance. It blames us for the actions of the so-called domestic animals that also exterminate species. In Mauritius, we can hold ourselves responsible for bringing in alien animals. But pigs, dogs, and cats are always exploring new territories, to the detriment of native species. The process is a necessary corollary of natural selection. We are mere accomplices.
We arrogantly see nonhuman animals as innocents at play in nature’s temple, potential victims of evil invading humans. But cats kill for fun, wolves slaughter more than they can eat, and pigs destroy the vegetation they depend on. Many animals are just as intemperate and greedy as we are, though we accomplish more in the way of destruction.
The facts force us to set aside ideas like “master,” “pet,” and “ownership” in favor of a subtler model. We do not “own” domestic animals, except in a legal sense that’s meaningless to other animals. We are their partners in an odd symbiosis that has altered us all—human, canine, porcine, feline, and the rest—into an agglomeration of strange species, a radical system that has remade every ecosystem it’s touched. If we have domesticated the other mammals, they also have domesticated us.
The chores done, we sat on the fence watching the castrated pigs at the trough. The weather had been dry and the dirt was in a fine powder when the rain began to fall. The drops were large. Each one sent up a puff of powdery dust. The pigs didn’t seem to mind the warm rain, and neither did we. After a while we went to a far corner of the pen to look at the spot where Cecil had thrown in the skunk. He had found the skunk that morning, road-killed the night before. All three of us had watched the pigs eat it, but we were still incredulous. Some black hair still lay on the spot, but that was all. No flesh remained, nor any bone, nor even the almost ineradicable smell of the skunk.
We decided to ride the cut pigs. Cecil went first. The pig he mounted turned a one-eighty and ran screaming under the sheet metal shelter, neatly scraping Cecil off. He rose covered with dust, a few fat raindrops giving him polka dots. “Very smart,” he said. “The horse never thinks to do that.” There were a few further attempts at pig-riding, all of them brief.
We went to look at the sow. She lay placid now, eight piglets crawling over each other for access to her dugs. Earlier we had seen her run to the trough, her quarter-ton bulk thundering with graceless speed, the piglets dropping from her dugs to squeal and writhe in the dust. No one suggested riding her.
“There were nine piglets,” Jim said. “She ate one.”
“He was a runt,” Cecil said, as if defending her. We watched. A sound like a distant waterfall rumbled in her throat. Her ears lay forward, concealing her eyes. On the back of one ear I saw half a dozen dark bits of shrapnel—fleas. I could see her skin through her sparse russet hair.
“That one old man fell down in his sow’s pen, and she ate him,” Cecil
said. “Somebody went to check on him of an evening and found him. Found his bloody clothes, anyway.”
We watched the piglets paw at the sagging dugs.
Human predation on wild pigs goes back at least as far as our cousins the Neanderthals. Pigs are tough to hunt because their noses and ears are better than ours, and because they’re smart. Cornered, they fight viciously. Ancient falconers made a safe sport of the pig. They sent golden eagles to attack from above, while they watched from a distance. There was no chance of the eagle bringing down the boar. It was pure blood sport.
The European sport of hunting wild boar spread with the colonial expansion of Europeans and pigs. Massive dogs bred for silence and strong jaws follow the boar by scent. Mongrel dogs follow the boar dogs. Rude, cowardly, uncivil, these mongrels will sound the cry when the boar dogs have brought the quarry to bay. Men on horseback follow the mongrels.
The boar: crescent-moon tusks, uppers honing the lowers with each hostile gnash of the jaws. The massive boar dogs look like ants in a big boar’s fur. They clamp onto ears and snout and are tossed by the tossing head. The tusks seek any unprotected flank. They aren’t horns, they don’t stab in; they bite. Some dogs will die before the human hunters catch up. The wounds are long and clean, a desert highway drawn in blood.
The men hear the yelping retreat of the mongrels. A hybrid dog is truer to itself than a purebred. It values its own life. No breed like the gigantic boar dogs could live long without human intervention. They are bred for suicide.
Arriving at the scene, the men see what they can see—perhaps nothing but dogs dying. If the dogs have the boar cornered, the men must face a charge. In old Europe they carried a long pike to meet the charge. It was equipped with a crossbar to stop a stabbed boar from coming all the way up, because pain certainly wouldn’t.
A man on a horse was not safe. The charge of a big boar, say four hundred pounds, would flatten a horse. A near miss might be close enough for the boar to scissor the horse’s belly open, literally spilling the guts. A boar screams like—well, like a stuck pig. Like the shrill of a human child, combined with a cavernous rumble.