Man vs. Wild

I killed my first scorpion two weeks ago. It had been terrorizing my house and yard by night for weeks. Now that the weather is cooling these nocturnal creatures are becoming more active. Talk about motivation to keep your room clean: lifting a dirty article of clothing to find a scorpion underneath is enough to make a 21 year-old man jump and scream like a school girl. Believe me, it happened. Several times. You may know of my irrational fear of spiders. Well, scorpions are like spiders - except they've got a stinger. And huge pincers. And they move crazy fast. They should probably go extinct ASAP.

I had seen this specific scorpion a few times in the prior couple weeks. At first I responded by avoiding the situation entirely: I slept outside on a raised platform where I hoped the scorpion could not get me. Unfortuantely it has since grown too cold to sleep outside. (Oh what I would give for the good ol' days of 100 degree nights!) One night it dropped into the upper 50s, which those of you have read The Tomato Paste Incident (September 2008 entry) will know is far too cold for a body grown accustomed to 120 degree scorchers that has lost 30 pounds of insulation.

I began sleeping inside the night before the night I rid myself of this nasty specimen. That first night posed no problems. I neither saw the beast nor heard it scuttling about my one-room house. Somehow I fell asleep, and did not think about it at all the next day.

However, that night, just as dusk was settling, I was sitting on my matela (a piece of cloth-covered foam used for sleeping by night and lounging by day) and writing in my journal when I heard a familiar faint scratching not far from me. I looked down and saw the gigantic heinous creature 18 inches from my hand, crawling between the wall and my matela. Its sickly brown, pointed legs were touching my matela... I sleep on that matela... Nasty. After shrieking, flailing, and fleeing the room, I regained my senses. Kind of. The creature had to die. I grabbed a big rock and re-entered the battleground. At first I didn't see it, which left me especially terrified: it could be anywhere, and it was about to become too dark to see properly. My room at this time was rife with objects under which the nasty bugger could hide (read: my room was a mess, as usual) and I began carefully picking up miscellaneous items. Then, I caught a glimpse of it in the distance. It hid behind my row of books in the corner. The rock would not fit between the books and the wall so I agitated the books and scared it out into the open. In the center of my room I carefully danced around it with the grace of an elephant avoiding a mouse. It successfully avoided several rounds of real-life Whack-A-Mole before disappearing once again.

I was reasonably convinced for a brief moment that this was in fact a magic scorpion that could make itself invisible because I have NO idea where it went. One second it was in the middle of the room running toward a corner, and the next, it was gone. I scoured the room in vain, carefully lifting each article of clothing and every book strewn about. At this point I was already half an hour late for dinner, so I decided to leave and to resume the hunt later, in the dark.

During dinner my host family could tell I was gloomy, as could my sitemate, Jessica, and I relayed the story to all of them. My host mom became very solemn and serious – she obviously understood how terrifying magical scorpions can be. Jessica resolved to help me hunt after dinner. She had killed two scorpions during the year she already spent in Chinguetti, and she even sounded chipper when she added, “I like killing scorpions.” We returned to my house and re-searched the entire room. No scorpion. I would have just given up if I hadn't been so scared that this fiend would re-appear after I fell asleep and that it would snuggle up next to me in bed.

I left the room to look again outside, and thank Allah, it appeared immediately. It was on a rocky bit of ground next to the kitchen. I wailed for Jessica to bring her scorpion-hunting prowess and, more importantly, the giant rock she was holding.

“Holy cow, it's a huge one!”

“Uh, yeah, I know. That's what I've been telling you all along.”

She then dropped the rock on top of the scorpion, but the crafty little bugger had nuzzled up next to a rock on the ground and was safe in the small triangle between the rock Jessica threw, the rock on the ground, and the ground itself. That was when the scorpion made its fatal assumption. Over the course of the previous weeks I had whined and run away every time I saw the thing, and it had become arrogant. It thought it could scare me again. It also probably assumed we didn't have another rock. Actually, it probably just wanted to make a mad dash for its home, which involved running directly at Jessica and me. Jessica, who had been standing in front of me and who was now sans weapon, shrieked and backed into my chest. I grabbed another rock, and with a light in one hand and a rock in the other, I awkwardly ambled around my sitemate and came face-to-face with the beast. It continued to run directly at us. It chased us out of the rocky area and onto the smooth, sandy part of the yard. With a soft thud, the rock from my hand ended the monster's reign.

I wish that were the end of the scorpion saga at chez-Carl.

I naively assumed my scorpion days were over that night. If Jess had only killed two during a whole year, certainly I would not see too many more, right?

One week ago I found another. It was stealthfully scrambling over the same rocky area where the first took refuge moments before its demise. The new one was much more moderate in size. It, however, ran the other way and scuttled into a crack the moment my light discovered it. I haven't seen it since. Hopefully it doesn't use its magical scorpion powers to snuggle with me at night.