I can hear the questions now. “Was it poisonous?” All scorpions are poisonous-that’s how they work. Was it deadly? The rule of thumb is the smaller the animal, the more toxic the venom. This one was nearly the length of my hand, so by the rule of thumb, it probably wasn’t deadly to humans. There was only one way to run the experiment and I really didn’t want to play, having grown attached to my thumb.
“How did you get yourself into this predicament?” I was in eastern Sudan, north of the Tropic of Cancer, just south of true desert, on an AID-financed expedition to control desert locusts. The locusts were late that year, so the team went to Plan B, studying the other animals in the area and determining what alternatives to DDT were least harmful to them. We also collected specimens from this seldom visited part of the world for friends and acquaintances at the Smithsonian.
“No, how did you get yourself into a situation from a bad movie or a funny cartoon?” We had a generator; the only electricity for a hundred miles in any direction. We had a TV and a VCR. We had two tapes. Two really bad movies; they were the only ones the US embassy in Khartoum was willing to part with and I really don’t remember either one. Suffice it to say, we had watched them both dozens of times just to pass the time between sunset and 10 pm when the generator kicked off. We had pooled our carefully hoarded snacks-a bag of mostly crushed chips, a few dented granola bars, a couple of squares of half-melted chocolate, and declared a movie night (again). What made this night special, were the two bottles of smuggled Ethiopian gin supplied by Paul, our camp manager, an ex Foreign Legion paratrooper. He bought them from gun runners supplying AK-47s and grenade launchers to Eritrean rebels about 50 kilometers south. At night we could hear their trucks off in the distance, a faint glow of masked headlights reflecting off the sand from miles away. Paul had picked up a case of Asmara gin from a smuggler headed north for another load of munitions. He said it was purely medicinal and claimed that, as a chronic malaria sufferer, the only cure for an attack was to get as drunk as possible, as quick as possible, for as long as possible. I don’t know if it helped the malaria any but it helped him pass the time.
The movies tracked, the gin was passed around and around and around. We timed the party to break up with ten minutes to spare before lights out. Lights out was the real deal. When the generator shut down, the entire camp went black. You could, if you had enough time for your eyes to adjust, make it to the latrine by starlight. The shack was black and white stripped so as to stand out in the darkness.
With unsteady steps and sloshing bladder, I wove my way toward the aforementioned convenience when a movement in the shadows at my feet caught my eye. “Gerbil” I thought and made a barehanded grab. This is not as crazy as it may sound—biologists are always grabbing specimens. Nets are usually just an ornament. The great Charles Darwin himself, collecting beetles saw a rare specimen while holding a beetle in each hand. He popped the left hand beetle in his mouth and grabbed, securing all three.
Of course it helps to make a good identification of what ever it is you are snatching at. An entomologist friend once grabbed a red velvet ant. Red velvet ants are wingless wasps, covered in red and black striped fur. Anything red or orange is warning you not to mess with it. Discretion is called for if not demanded. Heed the warning and you both walk away unscathed. Ignore it at your peril. My friend grabbed anyway and was stung twice before he could register what he had. His hand swelled to catcher’s mitt proportions and he only made it through the night with liberal applications of Benadryl and scotch.
I grabbed at the gerbil with my right hand. Small mammals are easy to grab. The worst they can do is bite. OK, so you get a mouse bite. Big deal; that’s the worst it can do on its way to the big museum in the sky. As soon as my hand closed on it, the still thinking part of my brain fired off a message: “Not a gerbil”. The next message, delivered, postage due, was: “Something bad.” They say God looks after fools and drunks and that night I was both. Pure blind dumb luck had me holding the scorpion, for that’s what my brain finally decided it was, just inside the last segment of the tail. That last segment was the one with the nuclear warhead. The scorpion wiggled in my grasp like an enraged miniature lobster, pinching me with its claws. Part of my thinking processes were going: “What a cool animal” other, more rational, parts were going: “Now what? You can’t drop it or it will nail you as soon as you let go. There is no doctor within a hundred miles and no hospital until you get to civilization. Oh, and by the way, the lights are going out any minute.”
I half ran half staggered back to the tent where the TV and gin were. My brain, helpful as ever, was chanting a mantra: “Don’t pass out, don’t throw up. Don’t pass out, don’t throw up.” I found an empty pint jar and a half full bottle. Using my teeth, I unscrewed the cap and poured the gin into the jar. I eased the scorpion, head first, into the gin and held it until it quit moving. As the lights cut out, I capped the jar, took a swing from the bottle, and walked with exaggerated care in the dark back to my tent and flopped down on my cot, hoping I wouldn’t dream. I’m sure that somewhere, Darwin was laughing.
