My late brother Tim had to ride the riding mower at our Cave City, Arkansas lake, all right, but not as often as he did. He liked to roam over the place, over hill and dale, checking it out on that thing. We'd explore as well as mow, with, half the time, me riding on the back of the mower, using it as my vehicle to get me to new explorations on the lake property near the road.
Missing Tim today, I can now recall the many incidents at the lake involving our interest in the newfound creatures up there: billions of mosquitos, millions of dragon flies and, perhaps most of all, the ant lions that lived in the sandy soil along the dirt roads, in numbers such as I'd never seen before.
Incredibly clever for "just bugs," the ant lion larvae dig tiny, inverted cone shaped holes in the sandy soil upon hatching; these become death traps for local ants, who find themselves unable to climb back out of the holes upon falling in, as the larvae shower them with dirt which prevents their escape. To a tiny ant, such a critter must be a horror, indeed. The word "lion" probably wouldn't really describe it: "ant dragon" would be more in order!
To put this into perspective and scale, imagine, for example, that, by some happenstance, you are in a desert area. Sand dunes and sand are all around. As you trek on, from one sand dune to the next, seeking escape, you suddenly become aware that, off the edges of some dunes are gigantic, cone-shaped holes whose edges the winds constantly keep stirred. Looking closer at one, you see that winds stir the sands along the curving surface of its slopes, which you now see are prodigious and intimidating.
As the winds kick up, you move on, only to be confronted by increasing numbers of these huge cone-shaped indentations in the sands. Finally, one sand dune you have climbed narrows into a walkway between two such cone-shaped holes. You also seem to feel a movement under your feet and, as you move one, the walkway gets ever-narrower.
Finally, your chosen path gets impossibly narrow. You find you must carefully skirt the edges of one of the cone-shaped holes. As the wind kicks more sand into your eyes, your foot falls down into the edge of the cone.
Suddenly, you feel a horrendous earth movement. A cloud of sand flies up onto you, striking you with such force that you lose your balance. You struggle to your feet and look downward, into the bottom of the cone-shaped pit. A horrendous-looking appendage seems to be moving down there, amidst the blowing sands. Terrified, you clamor up the sides of the steeply sloping cone, but find you lose a little ground and stumble back.
Then, as you once more struggle to your feet another clump of sand covers you, this time knocking you down and causing you to tumble far down into the pit, toward those dreadful appendages, which, as you tumble, you can now see more clearly.
They are the jaws of Death, indeed: huge pincers, with sharp edges and dreadfully big in relation to your size. Though you're about five or six feet high, these things are clearly twice to three times your size.
Even more terrifying than the sight of those jaws, however, is the vision of the eyes that accompany them. You now become aware of who your host is: he--or, more probably, she--is watching you. Her mandibles now toss another pile of sand onto you, pulling you ever more closely into her waiting, hypodermic-like jaw edges.
Then, suddenly, before you can even think, something unimaginably big lurches at you. She is out of her lair! Her arms brace her as she pounces, quickly, into the air--far enough for those huge mandibles to reach you.
You see them flash closer, faster. A blow knocks you down--you know not how or where it came from. Then, looking up, you see the edges of that mandible come falling down onto you.
If you are one of the few lucky ones, you will escape her grasp. But more likely, that mandible falls directly into you. An agonizing pain strikes as that jaw sinks into your body. Then a horrid sucking feeling begins. You are seized, banged, whammed around, until, virtually senseless and in agony, you begin to pass out as you feel all the blood flowing out of your body. She has you now.
Thus does the ant lion appear to the ant. We can just be thankful she doesn't appear so, to us!
Like me, Tim was also fascinated with the big lizards at the lake. We'd found one especially large one frequently basking on the rocks near the house. Mr. van Houten had mentioned him to us. He was the biggest lizard we'd ever seen--about 6 inches long, the size of a pocket knife. He was distinguishable not only by size, but because of his peculiar mannerism of raising himself up on his front legs as if doing push-ups.
This also made him fit right into the fantasies I'd been forming about finding a "lost world" of some sort there at the lake. That summer, I was reading Edgar Rice Burroughs's famous novels about Caspak or "Caprona": The Land That Time Forgot. I also read a number of other Burroughs novels, including Pellucidar, which was, as another novel title of his tells us, At The Earth's Core. In both of those places and a couple more, Burroughs fictionalized about giant reptiles, dinosaurs and sundry extinct creatures that still lived in splendid isolation as in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World.
One day, on our rounds on the riding mower, Tim and I sneaked up on this "giant" lizard on his usual rock. We stopped the mower well back, so as not to frighten him, and got a small sack over him. Then we put him in an old birdcage from Aunt Gwen's attic, named him Rex and Tim took him to "show and tell" at school.
The school was located near a bayou. Since I had told Tim that Rex ate mosquitoes, (that was why lizards were good to have around, you see), Tim decided that, to feed Rex, he'd have to take him down to the bayou and catch a few.
Incredibly, Tim recounted it later that he actually succeeded in catching some mosquitos alive. I've since tried to imagine what lengths my little brother must have gone to, there in the weeds, mud and swamp, to accomplish such a feat of reflex and speed.
But, in any case, as Tim was opening the cage door to drop some those dearly-caught mosquitos in, Rex jumped out. Tim first ran after him. Quickly outdistanced and bewildered, he then ran home to get me. I speedily jaunted after him, to join him at the bayou, along with our younger sisters, Amy and Ann.
Amy and Ann immediately began calling "Rex! Re-hex!"
"No, don't call him by his name," I said. "That only scares him and he doesn't know his name, anyway. Be real quiet, and maybe we can sneak up on Rex again."
Out there in that swampy bayou area, it's a wonder we didn't sneak up on a water moccasin.