Nerd - Tracks and Shadows: Field Biology as Art - page 22

rapt curiosity as Grandmommy converted fresh-drawn cream to butter by sloshing it
with a pole in a ceramic churn. A fireplace provided heat in winter. We passed one icy
morning wide-eyed with questions as a pig was dispatched with a bullet to the head,
then bled, scalded, shaved, and sliced up for the smokehouse—“Wow . . . so are those
the intestines? ” My mother's family used single-shot rifles and shotguns for putting rab-
bits, squirrels, and game birds on the table, and we were matter-of-factly taught firearm
safety and marksmanship. To this day I would no more assume a gun is unloaded or
carelessly swing the muzzle toward another person than step in front of a moving truck.
In 1958 the air force granted our father a year at the University of Oklahoma, and I
attended eighth grade at a progressive campus school. Surrounded by the flattest land
we'd ever seen, Will and I caught bullsnakes on the nearby prairie, fussed over hairless
babies from a road-killed opossum, and launched homemade rockets. My brother had a
knack for sports, and by dint of genes, upbringing, or both he shared Daddy's talents
for fixing anything from cameras to automobiles, whereas I was clumsy, worthless at
athletics, and utterly lacking in technical skills. We grew up liking topics, and I relished
a sense of writing something—one class paper was about Mexican axolotls, relatives of
tiger salamanders, and I tried to imagine actually discovering all those facts. Popular
music captivated us too, of which the Kingston Trio's mournful ballad about Tom Dooley,
hanged for stabbing his girlfriend, still comes to mind. Never having heard a cross word
between my parents, I couldn't imagine a man killing the woman he loved, let alone one
day knowing such people.
I look back on my teenage years with gratitude for the influence of several zoologists,
beginning at O.U. One day, Daddy came home with news of a professor who studied her-
petology, so I biked over and introduced myself. Charles Carpenter showed me lizard
nooses, snake sticks, and jars of specimens collected on his expeditions. He talked about
careers in biology, then recommended James Oliver's Natural History of North Amer-
ican Amphibians and Reptiles and Roger Conant's Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphi-
bians. 3 That night over dinner I announced that I too would become a professor, and
my folks soon gave me both topics as thirteenth birthday presents. Oliver laid out life-
style details not covered in older, more general works, and I was surprised that Con-
ant's small volume encompassed some three hundred species. On a class trip to O.U.'s
biological field station, I was even more impressed by Carpenter's outdoor enclosures
for observing lizards and his skill at capturing a snappy coachwhip snake.
Thanks to Daddy's next assignment we lived two blocks from Central Missouri State
College in Warrensburg, and that spring I accompanied a college class canoeing and
caving in the Ozarks. On our first afternoon out, while I drank from a rivulet, a student
clambering upslope dislodged a baseball-sized rock. Seconds later I fell to the side as
blood streamed over my face and hands; then the nasty scalp cut was stanched with a
bandana and I was ordered to take it easy. The following day things took an upswing
when I checked out side passages in Inca Cave and spotted a grotto salamander in the
beam of my headlamp. Typhlotriton spelaeus is blind and pigment free, and because
it wouldn't have visual predators, I was surprised that the three-inch-long troglodyte
waved its elevated tail back and forth when picked up. On the ride home I recalled Dr.
Carpenter's paper describing similar behavior in surface-dwelling tiger salamanders. A