HIKE OF THE MONTH

along the way Things That Go Bump in the Night

OUT OF THE EVENING SHADOWS, a humpbacked gopher staggered toward me. Or was it a skunk with a peg leg? Maybe a chuckwalla loopy from too much sun? Squinting into the failing light, I could only make out some ungainly critter-shape wobbling awkwardly across the yard.

One of those riotous post-monsoon sunsets lured me out to the patio. I watched the sky fill with mad, startling swirls of color, like Van Gogh emptying his pockets at the police station. Then with the veil of dusk spreading, I saw what seemed to be a two-headed packrat lurching toward me. Finally, the suspense pulled me from my chair, and I crept through the twilight for a better look.

Great jumping cholla! Suddenly I felt like Jeff Corwin going nose-to-nose with dangerous wildlife. At my feet was a tarantula hawk with a spider the size of a cantaloupe in tow. Tarantula hawks are 2-inch-long, fearsome wasps. The females hunt tarantulas with up to 7-inch leg spans, tracking them by smell and immobilizing them with a potent sting. The wasp drags the spider back to a burrow, lays an egg on the spider's abdomen and plugs the burrow with soil. Upon hatching, the larva feeds on the spider, eventually bursting forth and devouring it. And get this: The sting does not kill the spider. The hapless arachnid remains paralyzed, but alive, while all this unfolds.

It's a cruel end for the tarantula. So naturally I sprinted inside for my camera. Not for me, but for the kids-all two dozen of them-who would want to relive every gruesome moment.

My sister teaches third grade in Cincinnati, and when I travel back for a family visit, I speak to her class about life in the desert. A good lecturer always gives an audience what it wants and, in the case of that squirmy crowd, they want gross, gory and, above all, scary. They listen politely for a few minutes about the wonders of the saguaro cactus and the stark majesty Of the landscape. After that I'd better whip up a rattlesnake for them, or at least a horned lizard that spurts blood from its eyes. (Yes, in Arizona, we have those, too.) Fortunately, I am loaded with rattler stories and reel them off at the slightest provocation. Tales of my Gila monster encounters bewitch even the most jaded video-gamers among the class, who sit popeyed, ears pricked like coyote pups.

Mountain lions, bobcats, bats, black widows, giant desert centipedes and killer bees enthrall these jelly-faced cherubs from the Midwest. They squeal with delight over dung beetles and love scorpions. But nothing elicits the chorus of "Coool!" and "Ewww!" like tales of tarantulas, the spiders that crawl right out of horror movies and into their imaginations. Now, even more menacing than tarantulas, they can hear about the wasps that hunt them.

By this time in their young lives, the kids have had the "big talk" with their parents. Not that "big talk." The other "big talk," about how there's no such thing as monsters. No bogeymen, or closet-lurking ghouls or tentacled aliens hiding under the bed just waiting to grab wrists or ankles dangled carelessly over the side. Everything that goes bump in the night gets explained away. Yet these young souls are not quite ready to buy into that mundane reality.

Then I come along, with my tales of poisonous lizards and winged beasts dragging huge paralyzed spiders off into the darkness, and they are vindicated. It's okay to be scared sometimes.

It's okay because whether they have four, six, eight legs or none at all, monsters do exist, even if only in an exotic faraway land known as the desert.

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