Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

by Annie Dillard

  I never step a foot out of the house, even in winter, without a snakebite kit in my pocket. Mine is a small kit in rubber casing about the size of a shotgun shell; I slapped my pants instinctively to fix in my mind its location. Then I stomped hard on the ground a few times and sat down beside the snake.

  The young copperhead was motionless on its rock. Although it lay in a loose sprawl, all I saw at first was a camouflage pattern of particolored splotches confused by the rushing speckles of light in the weeds between us, and by the deep twilight dark of the quarry pond beyond the rock. Then suddenly the form of its head emerged from the confusion: burnished brown, triangular, blunt as a stone ax. Its head and the first four inches of its body rested on airy nothing an inch above the rock. I admired the snake. Its scales shone with newness, bright and buffed. Its body was perfect, whole and unblemished. I found it hard to believe it had not just been created on the spot, or hatched fresh from its mother, so unscathed and clean was its body, so unmarked by any passage.

  Did it see me? I was only four feet away, seated on the weedy cliff behind the sandstone ledge; the snake was between me and the quarry pond. I waved an arm in its direction: nothing moved. Its low-forehead glare and lipless reptile smirk revealed nothing. How could I tell where it was looking, what it was seeing? I squinted at its head, staring at those eyes like the glass eyes of a stuffed warbler, at those scales like shields canted and lapped just so, to frame an improbable, unfathomable face.

  Yes, it knew I was there. There was something about its eyes, some alien alertness…what on earth must it be like to have scales on your face? All right then, copperhead. I know you’re here, you know I’m here. This is a big night. I dug my elbows into rough rock and dry soil and settled back on the hillside to begin the long business of waiting out a snake.

  The only other poisonous snake around here is the timber rattler, Crotalus horridus horridus. These grow up to six feet long in the mountains, and as big as your thigh. I’ve never seen one in the wild; I don’t know how many have seen me. I see copperheads, though, sunning in the dust, disappearing into rock cliff chinks, crossing dirt roads at twilight. Copperheads have no rattle, of course, and, at least in my experience, they do not give way. You walk around a copperhead—if you see it. Copperheads are not big enough or venomous enough to kill adult humans readily, but they do account for far and away the greatest number of poisonous snakebites in North America: there are so many of them, and people, in the Eastern woodlands. It always interests me when I read about new studies being done on pit vipers; the team of herpetologists always seems to pick my neck of the woods for its fieldwork. I infer that we have got poisonous snakes as East Africa has zebras or the tropics have orchids—they are our specialty, our stock-in-trade. So I try to keep my eyes open. But I don’t worry: you have to live pretty far out to be more than a day from a hospital. And worrying about getting it in the face from a timber rattler is like worrying about being struck by a meteorite: life’s too short. Anyway, perhaps the actual bite is painless.

  One day I was talking about snakes to Mrs. Mildred Sink, who operates a switchboard. A large pane separated us, and we were talking through a circular hole in the glass. She was seated in a dark room little bigger than a booth. As we talked, red lights on her desk would flash. She would glance at them, then back at me, and, finishing her point with careful calmness, she would fix on me a long, significant look to hold my attention while her hand expertly sought the button and pushed it. In this way she handled incoming calls and told me her snake story.

  When she was a girl, she lived in the country just north of here. She had a brother four years old. One bright summer day her brother and her mother were sitting quietly in the big room of the log cabin. Her mother had her sewing in her lap and was bent over it in concentration. The little boy was playing with wooden blocks on the floor. “Ma,” he said, “I saw a snake.” “Where?” “Down by the spring.” The woman stitched the hem of a cotton dress, gathering the material with her needle and drawing it smooth with her hand. The little boy piled his blocks carefully, this way and that. After a while he said. “Ma, it’s too dark in here, I can’t see.” She looked up and the boy’s leg was swollen up as big around as his body.

  Mrs. Sink nodded at me emphatically and then heeded the flashing light on the panel before her. She turned away; this caller was taking time. I waved and caught her eye; she waved, and I left.

  The copperhead in front of me was motionless; its head still hung in the air above the sandstone rock. I thought of poking at it with a weed, but rejected the notion. Still, I wished it would do something. Marston Bates tells about an English ecologist, Charles Elton, who said, with his Britishness fully unfurled, “All cold-blooded animals…spend an unexpectedly large proportion of their time doing nothing at all, or at any rate nothing in particular.” That is precisely what this one was doing.

  I noticed its tail. It tapered to nothingness. I started back at the head and slid my eye down its body slowly: taper, taper, taper, scales, tiny scales, air. Suddenly the copperhead’s tail seemed to be the most remarkable thing I had ever seen. I wished I tapered like that somewhere. What if I were a shaped balloon blown up through the tip of a finger?

  Here was this blood-filled, alert creature, this nerved rope of matter, really here instead of not here, splayed soft and solid on a rock by the slimmest of chances. It was a thickening of the air spread from a tip, a rush into being, eyeball and blood, through a pin-hole rent. Every other time I had ever seen this rock it had been a flat sandstone rock over the quarry pond; now it hosted and bore this chunk of fullness that parted the air around it like a driven wedge. I looked at it from the other direction. From tail to head it spread like the lines of a crescendo, widening from stillness to a turgid blast; then at the bulging jaws it began contracting again, diminuendo, till at the tip of its snout the lines met back at the infinite point that corners every angle, and that space once more ceased being a snake.

  While this wonder engaged me, something happened that was so unusual and unexpected that I can scarcely believe I saw it. It was ridiculous.

  Night had been rising like a ground vapor from the blackened quarry pool. I heard a mosquito sing in my ear; I waved it away. I was looking at the copperhead. The mosquito landed on my ankle; again, I idly brushed it off. To my utter disbelief, it lighted on the copperhead. It squatted on the copperhead’s back near its “neck,” and bent its head to its task. I was riveted. I couldn’t see the mosquito in great detail, but I could make out its lowered head that seemed to bore like a well drill through surface rock to fluid. Quickly I looked around to see if I could find anyone—any hunter going to practice shooting beer cans, any boy on a motorbike—to whom I could show this remarkable sight while it lasted.

  To the best of my knowledge, it lasted two or three full minutes; it seemed like an hour. I could imagine the snake, like the frog sucked dry by the giant water bug, collapsing to an empty bag of skin. But the snake never moved, never indicated any awareness. At last the mosquito straightened itself, fumbled with its forelegs about its head like a fly, and sluggishly took to the air, where I lost it at once. I looked at the snake; I looked beyond the snake to the ragged chomp in the hillside where years before men had quarried stone; I rose, brushed myself off, and walked home.

  Is this what it’s like, I thought then, and think now: a little blood here, a chomp there, and still we live, trampling the grass? Must everything whole be nibbled? Here was a new light on the intricate texture of things in the world, the actual plot of the present moment in time after the fall: the way we the living are nibbled and nibbling—not held aloft on a cloud in the air but bumbling pitted and scarred and broken through a frayed and beautiful land.

  II

  When I reached home, I turned first to the bookshelf, to see if I could possibly have seen what I thought I had. All I could find was this sentence in Will Barker’s book, Familiar Insects of North America: “The bite of the female [Mosquito, Culex pipi
ens] is effected with a little drill that can puncture many types of body covering—even the leathery skin of a frog or the overlapping scales on a snake.” All right then; maybe I had seen it. Anything can happen in any direction; the world is more chomped than I’d dreamed.

  It is mid-September now; I can see in the fading light the jagged holes in the leaves of the mock-orange hedge outside my study window. The more closely I look, the more I doubt that there is a single whole, unblemished leaf left on the bush. I go out again and examine the leaves one by one, first of the mock orange outside my study, then of the cherry tree in the yard. In the blue light I see scratched and peeled stems, leaves that are half-eaten, rusted, blighted, blistered, mined, snipped, smutted, pitted, puffed, sawed, bored, and rucked. Where have I been all summer while the world has been eaten?

  I remember something else I saw this week. I passed on the road by the creek a small boy bearing aloft an enormous foot-long snapping turtle. The boy was carrying the turtle—which was stretching and snapping wildly in the air—at arm’s length, and his arms must have been tired, for he asked me plaintively, “Do you have a box?” when I was on foot myself and quite clearly did not have a box. I admired the turtle, but the boy was worried. “He’s got bleachers,” he said. “Bleachers?” “You know, they suck your blood.” Oh. I had noticed the black leech drooping like a tar tear down the turtle’s thick shell. The boy showed me another one, almost two inches long, fixed to the granular skin under the turtle’s foreleg. “Will they kill him?” the boy asked. “Will he live?” Many, if not most, of the wild turtles I see harbor leeches. I assured him that the turtle would live. For most creatures, being parasitized is a way of life—if you call that living.

  I think of the fox that Park Service Ranger Gene Parker told me about. The fox sprawled naked and pink-skinned in a mountain field, unable to rise, dying of mange. I think of the swimming bluegill I saw at the Lawsons’, upstream in Tinker Creek on the other side of Tinker Mountain. One of its eyes was blinded by an overgrowth of white water mold, a white that spread halfway down its back in filmy lumps like soaked cotton batting. It had been injured, perhaps when a fisherman had hooked it and tossed it back, perhaps when a flood dashed it on rocks, and the fungus had spread from the injured site. I think of Loren Eiseley’s description of a scientist he met in the field, who was gleefully bearing a bloody jar squirming with yard after yard of some unthinkable parasite he had just found in the belly of a rabbit. Suddenly the lives of the parasites—some sort of hellish hagiography—come to mind. I remember the bloodworms and flukes, whose parasitic life cycles require the living bodies of as many as four hosts. How many of the grasshoppers that hurtled around me in the Lucas meadow bore inside their guts the immense coiled larvae of horsehair worms?

  I received once as a gift a small, illustrated layman’s guide to insect pests. These are insects that for one reason or another are in the way of human culture—or economics. By no means all are parasites. Nevertheless, the book reads like the devil’s summa theologica. The various insects themselves include cottony-cushion scales, bean beetles, borers, weevils, bulb flies, thrips, cutworms, stink bugs, screw-worms, sawflies, poultry lice, cheese skippers, cheese mites, cluster flies, puss caterpillars, itch mites, and long-tailed mealy bugs. Of cockroaches the book says, “When very abundant, they may also eat human hair, skin, and nails.” (The key word, skin, is buried.) The fullcolor pictures show warbled beef and fly-blown gashes, blighted trees and blasted corn, engorged ticks and seething ham, pus-eyed hogs and the wormy nostrils of sheep.

  In another book I learn that ten percent of all the world’s species are parasitic insects. It is hard to believe. What if you were an inventor, and you made ten percent of your inventions in such a way that they could only work by harassing, disfiguring, or totally destroying the other ninety percent? These things are not well enough known.

  There is, for instance, a species of louse for almost every species of everything else. In addition to sucking blood, lice may also eat hair, feathers, the dry scales of moths, and other lice. Birdbanders report that wild birds are universally infested with lice, to each its own. Songbirds often squat in the dust near ant hills and spray themselves with a shower of living ants; it is thought that the formic acid in the ants discourages the presence of lice. “Each species of auk has its own species of louse, found on all individuals examined.” The European cuckoo is the sole host to three species of lice, and the glossy ibis to five, each specializing in eating a different part of the host’s body. Lice live in the hollow quills of birds’ feathers, in warthog bristles, in Antarctic seals’ flippers and pelican pouches.

  Fleas are almost as widely distributed as lice, but much more catholic in their choice of hosts. Immature fleas, interestingly, feed almost entirely on the feces of their parents and other adults, while mature fleas live on sucked blood.

  Parasitic two-winged insects, such as flies and mosquitoes, abound. It is these that cause hippos to live in the mud and frenzied caribou to trample their young. Twenty thousand head of domestic livestock died in Europe from a host of black flies that swarmed from the banks of the Danube in 1923. Some parasitic flies live in the stomachs of horses, zebras, and elephants; others live in the nostrils and eyes of frogs. Some feed on earthworms, snails, and slugs; others attack and successfully pierce mosquitoes already engorged on stolen blood. Still others live on such delicate fare as the brains of ants, the blood of nestling songbirds, or the fluid in the wings of lacewings and butterflies.

  The lives of insects and their parasites are horribly entwined. The usual story is that the larva of the parasite eats the other insect alive in any of several stages and degrees of consciousness. It is above all parasitic Hymenoptera—which for the sake of simplicity I shall call wasps—that specialize in this behavior. Some species of wasps are so “practiced” as parasites that the female will etch a figure-eight design on the egg of another insect in which she has just laid her egg, and other wasps will avoid ovipositing on those marked, already parasitized eggs. There are over one hundred thousand species of parasitic wasps, so that, although many life histories are known, many others are still mysterious. British entomologist R. R. Askew says, “The field is wide open, the prospect inviting.” The field may be wide open, but—although most of my favorite entomologists seem to revel in these creatures—the prospect is, to me at least, scarcely inviting.

  Consider this story of Edwin Way Teale’s. He brought a monarch butterfly caterpillar inside to photograph just as it was about to pupate. The pale green caterpillar had hung itself upside-down from a leaf, as monarch caterpillars have done from time immemorial, in the form of a letter J.

  “All that night it remained as it was. The next morning, at eight o’clock, I noticed that the curve in the ‘J’ had become shallower. Then, suddenly, as though a cord within had been severed, the larva straightened out and hung limp. Its skin was baggy and lumpy. It began to heave as the lumps within pushed and moved. At 9:30 A.M., the first of the six white, fat-bodied grubs appeared through the skin of the caterpillar. Each was about three eighths of an inch in length.” This was the work of a parasitic wasp.

  There is a parasitic wasp that travels on any adult female praying mantis, feeding on her body wherever she goes. When the mantis lays her eggs, the wasp lays hers, inside the frothy mass of bubbles before it hardens, so that the early-hatching wasp larvae emerge inside the case to eat the developing mantis eggs. Others eat cockroach eggs, ticks, mites, and houseflies. Many seek out and lay eggs on the caterpillars of butterflies and moths; sometimes they store paralyzed, living caterpillars, on which eggs have been laid, in underground burrows where they stay “fresh” for as long as nine months. Askew, who is apparently very alert, says, “The mass of yellowish cocoons of the braconid Apanteles glomeratus beneath the shrivelled remains of a large white butterfly caterpillar are a familiar sight.”

  There are so many parasitic wasps that some parasitic wasps have parasitic wasps. One startled entomol
ogist, examining the gall made by a vegetarian oak gall wasp, found parasitism of the fifth order. This means that he found the remains of an oak gall wasp which had a parasitic wasp which had another which had another which had another which had another, if I count it aright.

  Other insect orders also include fascinating parasites. Among true bugs are bed-bugs, insects that parasitize dozens of species of bats, and those that parasitize bed-bugs. Parasitic beetles as larvae prey on other insects, and as adults on bees and kangaroos. There is a blind beetle that lives on beavers. The conenose bug, or kissing bug, bites the lips of sleeping people, sucking blood and injecting an excruciating toxin.

  There is an insect order that consists entirely of parasitic insects called, singly and collectively, stylops, which is interesting because of the grotesquerie of its form and its effects. Stylops parasitize divers other insects such as leaf hoppers, ants, bees, and wasps. The female spends her entire life inside the body of her host, with only the tip of her bean-shaped body protruding. She is a formless lump, having no wings, legs, eyes, or antennae; her vestigial mouth and anus are tiny, degenerate, and nonfunctional. She absorbs food—her host—through the skin of her abdomen, which is “inflated, white, and soft.”

  The sex life of a stylops is equally degenerate. The female has a wide, primitive orifice called a “brood canal” near her vestigial mouth-parts, out in the open air. The male inserts his sperm into the brood canal, from whence it flows into her disorganized body and fertilizes the eggs that are floating freely there. The hatched larvae find their way to the brood canal and emerge into the “outside world.”