Likewise when Adam heard the honk of wild geese he made haste to have Genie see them winging wide and triangular flight across the blue sky, to the north. He told her how they lived all the winter in the warm south, and when spring came a wonderful instinct bade them rise and fly far northward, to the reedy banks of some lonely lake, and there gobble and honk and feed and raise their young.
On another day, and this was in drowsy June when all the air seemed still, he was roused from his siesta by cries of delight from Genie. She knelt before him on the sand, and in one hand she held a beautiful horned toad, and the other hand she stretched out to Adam.
“Look! Oh, look!” she cried, ecstatically, and her eyes then rivaled the jeweled eyes of the desert reptile. Some dark-red drops of bright liquid showed against the brown of Genie’s hand. “There! It’s blood! I picked him up as I had all the others, so many hundreds of times. Only this time I felt something warm and wet. I looked at my hand. There! He had squirted the drops of blood! And, oh, I was quick to look at his eyes! One was still wet, bloody. I know he squirted the drops of blood from his eyes!”
Thus Adam had confirmed for him one of the mysteries of the desert. Dismukes had been the first to tell Adam about the strange habit of horned toads ejecting blood from their eyes. One other desert man, at least, had corroborated Dismukes. But Adam, who had seldom passed a horned toad without picking it up to gaze at the wondrous coloration, and to see it swell and puff, had never come upon the peculiar phenomenon. And horned toads on his trails had been many. To interest Genie, he built her a corral of flat stones in the sand, and he scoured the surrounding desert for horned toads. What a miscellaneous collection he gathered! They all had the same general scalloped outlines and tiny horns, but the color and design seemed to partake of the physical characteristics of the spot where each was found. If they squatted in the sand and lay still, it was almost impossible to see them, so remarkable was their protective coloration. Adam turned the assortment over to Genie with instruction to feed them, and play with them, and tease them in the hope that one might sometime eject drops of blood from his eyes. When it actually happened, Genie’s patience was rewarded.
Adam’s theory that the reward of the faithful desert watcher would always come was exemplified in more than one way. Genie had never seen or heard of a tarantula wasp. She had noticed big and little tarantulas, but of the fierce, winged, dragon-fly hawk of the desert—the tarantula wasp—she had no knowledge. Adam, therefore, had always kept a keen lookout for one.
They were up in the canyon on a hot June day, resting in the shade of the rustling palms. A stream babbled and splashed over the stones, and that was the only sound to break the dreaming silence of the canyon. All at once Adam heard a low whir like the hum of tiny wings. As he turned his head the sound became a buzz. Then he espied a huge tarantula wasp. Quickly he called to Genie, and they watched. It flew around and around about a foot from the ground, a fierce-looking, yet beautiful creature, with yellow body and blue gauzy wings. It was fully two inches and more long.
“He sees a tarantula. Now watch!” whispered Adam.
Suddenly the wasp darted down to the edge of a low bush, into some coarse grass that grew there. Instantly came a fierce whiz of wings, like the buzz of a captured bumblebee, only much louder and more vibrant. Adam saw the blades of grass tumble. A struggle to the death was going on there. Adam crawled over a few yards, drawing Genie with him; and they saw the finish of a terrific battle between the wasp and a big hairy tarantula.
“There! It’s over, and the tarantula is dead,” said Adam. “Genie, I used to watch this kind of a desert fight, and not think much more about it. But one day I made a discovery. I had a camp over here, and I watched a tarantula wasp kill a tarantula. I didn’t know it then, but this wasp was a female, ready to lay her eggs. Well, she rolled the big spider around until she found a place that suited her. Then she dug a hole, rolled him into it, covered him over, and flew away. I wondered then why she did that. I went away from that camp, and after a while I came back. Then one day I remembered about the wasp burying the tarantula. And so, just for fun and curiosity, I found the grave—it was near the end of a stone—and I opened it up. What do you think I discovered?”
“Tell me!” exclaimed Genie, breathlessly.