The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators - Softcover

Grice, Gordon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385318901 ISBN 13: 9780385318907

Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Snake venom that digests human flesh. A building cleared of every living thing by a band of tiny spiders. An infant insect eating its living prey from within, saving the vital organs for last. These are among the deadly feats of natural engineering you'll witness in The Red Hourglass, prize-winning author Gordon Grice's masterful, poetic, often dryly funny exploration of predators he has encountered around his rural Oklahoma home.

Grice is a witty and intrepid guide through a world where mating ends in cannibalism, where killers possess toxins so lethal as to defy our ideas of a benevolent God, where spider remains, scattered like "the cast-off coats of untidy children," tell a quiet story of violent self-extermination. It's a world you'll recognize despite its exotic strangeness--the world in which we live. Unabashedly stepping into the mix, Grice abandons his role as objective observer with beguiling dark humor--collecting spiders and other vermin, decorating a tarantula's terrarium with dollhouse furniture, or forcing a battle between captive insects because he deems one "too stupid to live."

Kill. Eat. Mate. Die. Charting the simple brutality of the lives of these predators, Grice's starkly graceful essays guide us toward startling truths about our own predatory nature. The Red Hourglass brings us face to fanged face with the inadequacy of our distinctions between normal and abnormal, dead and alive, innocent and evil.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gordon Grice's writing about the black widow spider has appeared in High Plains Literary Review and Harper's. It has been anthologized in Houghton Mifflin's Best American Essays 1996 and in college readers. Grice teaches humanities and English at Seward County Community College in Liberal, Kansas. He lives in rural Oklahoma with his wife and their three-year-old son.

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Snake venom that digests human flesh. A building cleared of every living thing by a band of tiny spiders. An infant insect eating its living prey from within, saving the vital organs for last. These are among the deadly feats of natural engineering you'll witness in The Red Hourglass, prize-winning author Gordon Grice's masterful, poetic, often dryly funny exploration of predators he has encountered around his rural Oklahoma home.

Grice is a witty and intrepid guide through a world where mating ends in cannibalism, where killers possess toxins so lethal as to defy our ideas of a benevolent God, where spider remains, scattered like "the cast-off coats of untidy children," tell a quiet story of violent self-extermination. It's a world you'll recognize despite its exotic strangeness--the world in which we live. Unabashedly stepping into the mix, Grice abandons his role as objective observer with beguiling dark humor--collecting spiders and other vermin, decorating a tarantula's terrarium with dollhouse furniture, or forcing a battle between captive insects because he deems one "too stupid to live."

Kill. Eat. Mate. Die. Charting the simple brutality of the lives of these predators, Grice's starkly graceful essays guide us toward startling truths about our own predatory nature. The Red Hourglass brings us face to fanged face with the inadequacy of our distinctions between normal and abnormal, dead and alive, innocent and evil.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Black Widow


I hunt black widow spiders.  When I find one, I capture it.  I have found them in discarded car wheels and under railroad ties.  I have found them in house foundations and cellars, in automotive shops and toolsheds, against fences and in cinder block walls.  As a boy I used to lift the iron lids that guarded underground water meters, and there in the darkness of the meter wells I would often see something round as a flensed human skull, glinting like chipped obsidian, scarred with a pair of crimson triangles that touched each other to form an hourglass: the widow as she looks in shadow.  A quick stir with a stick would trap her for a few seconds in her own web, long enough for me to catch her in a jar.

When I walk the paved paths in a certain landscaped park in my hometown, a hot day will sometimes show me a sparkle that vanishes with any slight change of angle, and near it some windblown garbage will be lodged in the crags of a piece of granite or in the sandy dirt gathered by a prickly pear.  A minute's investigation reveals that garbage, stone, cactus, and earth are all held together by an almost invisible web, at the corner of which the clawed tips of a black widow's sleek legs protrude from some crevice.  To catch a widow in this situation, I have to find a live insect and toss it into her web.  Only after she has come out to kill the insect and is lost in the business of biting and wrapping do I have a good chance of catching her; otherwise, she is too quick to retreat to her hiding place.

In the dry Oklahoma Panhandle, I found one under the threshold of my back door.  It thrust its forelegs into the kitchen to threaten the pencil I prodded it with.  Years later, when I lived in the humid Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, my wife and I had taken a new apartment, and a second before Tracy sat down on our new threshold I recognized those black lines, which might have been cracks in the cement, as a widow's legs: I yanked the spider out and captured it in a coffee can.

I have found widows on playground equipment, in a hospital, in the lair of a rattlesnake, and once on the bottom of the lawn chair I was sitting in as I looked at some widows I had captured elsewhere that day.

Sometimes I raise a generation or two in captivity.  The egg sacs contain multitudes of pinpoint cannibals.  Growing for several days on the residual energy of the egg yolk they consumed before hatching, they molt before ever eating.  The mass of them appears as a dirty cloud at the center of the egg sac, gradually expanding into a visibly moving stain that fills the sac.  They live in their private sphere for about five days before they venture out into the world through a single, perfectly round hole chewed by one precocious sister, and as they leave they trail fine silk that gleams with the sun, the group of them producing a glimmering tangle like a model of an electron cloud, the empty sac its nucleus.  After a day in that tight formation, they drift away from each other.

They grow rapidly, the most successful eaters shucking a skin every few days.  They begin as swirls of light brown and cream, then darken with each molt, resolving into brown with white spots.  A white hourglass is soon clear on the belly.  In the females, a pale orange hue dawns in the center of the hourglass with succeeding molts; the brown rapidly darkens.  The orange deepens to red, like a sunset, and spreads outward to infect the entire hourglass.  As adults their black is broken only by the crimson hourglass and, depending on the individual, perhaps a few other specks or stripes of red or a white dot.  The male may retain his infant colors, or he may grow black and sport a psychedelic array of red, gold, and white marks.

I separate the siblings before they mature, usually when three or four remain from the original cannibal brood.  It's not chance that causes these few to survive.  From the beginning they were bigger, stronger, more aggressive than their sibs, and grew faster.  Wild widows eat nothing for the first few days except each other; even in captivity, given plenty of small insects, the spiders prefer the taste of their sibs.  The teeming masses of humbler spiderlings exist to feed the voracious few.  Now I feed these few on bigger game, starting with houseflies and mosquitoes and progressing to larger insects such as crickets and bumblebees.

But I don't dare open the container until they have done their culling.  Once, I let eleven egg sacs hatch out in a container about eighteen inches on a side, a tight wooden box with a sliding glass top.  As I tried to move the box one day, I tripped.  The lid slid off and I fell, hands first, into the mass of young widows.  Most were still translucent cream-and-brown newborns.  A few of the females were bigger and darker, but not yet black.  Tangles of broken web clung to my forearms, and the spiderlings moved among my arm hairs like trickling water.

Most of them were surely too small in the jaw to puncture my skin, but they had their toxin.  The poison is there from the beginning.  In the old days of the American West, Gosiute warriors ground the eggs onto their arrowheads to make them deadly.

I walked out into the open air and raised my arms into the stiff wind.  The widows answered the wind with new strands of web and drifted away, their bodies gold in the afternoon sun.  In about ten minutes my arms carried nothing but old web and the husks of spiderlings eaten by their sibs.

I have never been bitten.  The black widow has an ugly web.  The orb weavers make those seemingly delicate nets that poets have traditionally used as symbols of imagination, order, and perfection.  The sheet-web spiders weave crisp linens on grass and bushes.  But the widow makes messy-looking tangles in the corners and bends of things and under logs and debris.  Often the web is littered with leaves.  Beneath it lie the husks of insect prey cut loose and dropped, their antennae stiff as gargoyle horns; on them and the surrounding ground are splashes of the spider's white urine, which looks like bird guano and smells of ammonia even at a distance of several feet.  This fetid material draws scavengers--ants, crickets, roaches, and so on--which become tangled in vertical strands of silk reaching from the ground to the main body of the web.  Sometimes these vertical strands break and recoil, hoisting the new prey as if on a bungee cord.  The widow comes down and, with a bicycling of the hind pair of legs, throws gummy silk onto the victim.

When the prey is seriously tangled but still struggling, the widow cautiously descends and bites the creature, usually on a leg joint.  This bite pumps neurotoxin into the victim, paralyzing it; it remains alive but immobile for what follows.  As the creature's struggles diminish, the widow delivers a series of bites, injecting digestive fluids.  Finally she will settle down to suck the liquefied innards out of the prey, changing position two or three times to get it all.

Before the eating begins, and sometimes before the slow venom quiets the victim, the widow usually moves the meal higher into the web.  She attaches some line to the prey with a leg-bicycling toss, moves up the vertical web-strand that originally snagged the prey, crosses a diagonal strand upward into the cross-hatched main body of the web, and here secures the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0385318901
• ISBN 13: 9780385318907
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 275
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland