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Outside Magazine October 2004

Outside's Guilty Pleasures
Crunch Time
When critters are getting eaten, I'll be there

By Ian Frazier

I LIKE TO WATCH THINGS GET EATEN. I know this minor outdoor pastime is not entirely healthy, but it scratches an itch, somehow. On a river I can get so absorbed in watching trout feed on mayflies that I forget to fish. When I lived near the Clark Fork River in Montana, I sometimes would go to it without my fishing rod and observe the armadas of newly hatched mayflies as they floated downstream over pods of hungry rainbows. I would choose a mayfly that looked especially lucky and root for him to make it through. (Often I imagined the mayfly was me.) With amazing predestination, he would float unscathed past the sinks of trout mouths sucking in his pals around him. My mayfly's wet wings began to flutter, he was about to fly away—and then GULP! Too bad! I used to put minutes, quarter-hours, half-hours into this game, like ever larger sums into a slot machine.

I've watched sparrows eat grasshoppers in a Missouri River park—a good-size hopper can give a sparrow quite a tussle—and peregrine falcons eat pigeons in Brooklyn, and bald eagles swoop down on spawning salmon in Glacier National Park. Once an outdoor-writer friend in Missoula, Montana, told me that in late summer in the Mission Mountains, north of town, there is an enormous hatch of ladybugs on a particular mountainside, and sometimes officials have to close the area to hikers so they won't meet up with the grizzly bears that come to feed. A grizzly eating masses of ladybugs is a sight I'd love to see.

During a reclusive period, I spent a couple of months by myself at a campsite in northern Michigan. In the evenings I fished, and in the afternoons I read Proust. I was proceeding through a volume of Remembrance of Things Past when I noticed, in the sandy soil of the hilltop where I sat, several cone-shaped holes. These were the holes of the ground spider, an architecturally gifted predator who traps insect pedestrians. The ground spider excavates a hole and gets the grade of its sides just right, and then he waits under a thin layer of sand at the bottom. When an ant or beetle steps in and tries to scramble out, the ground spider instantly throws spurts of sand up the sides so they become like a fast-moving down escalator hurrying the victim to him.

As Proust's narrator, Marcel, offered yet another multi-thousand-word disquisition on the suspected infidelities of his girlfriend, Albertine, I counted on the ground spider to provide an action sequence or two. Sure enough, pretty soon an ant came along and fell into the hole, and the exciting part began. Once a bee walking on the forest floor tumbled in, and you never saw such a fight—wings buzzing, sand flying. During slow periods, I was not above helping the plot along by tossing in a deerfly that had become entangled in my hair. The thoughtful way the spider dined afterwards, with just his victim's rear legs sticking up above the sand, revealed deep truths about storytelling. Remembrance of Things Past, ground spider version, is the translation I recommend. It makes the underlying who-eats-who easier to understand.

Next Page: At Walden Pond, they forbid inflatable pool toys. Sounds ripe for disobedience, don't you think?

Contributing editor IAN FRAZIER wrote about outdoor phobias in October 2003.

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