An old friend spotted during West Texas trip
On that little trip west I was telling you about last week, I was pleased to see a red ant bed in the gravel parking lot of a cafe in Fort Stockton.
In my early times, in that Cross Timbers country out west of Fort Worth, ants of this kind gave me plenty of misery. A kid going barefooted in summer, running up and down creek banks and across mesquite pastures, was certain to collect a few red ant stings, and those babies could sure get your attention.
If a couple of them happened to pop you on a toe, you were in for a bad night. That’s how I discovered that one stung toe could cause throbbing pain all the way up to a kneecap.
Why, then, would I be pleased to see a red ant bed in the city of Fort Stockton?
Because I hadn’t seen one anywhere in several years. Red ants are gone from about half of Texas, the half that I now live in. I hope never to get stung by one again, and yet I’m glad they’re still a part of the wildlife in our state. It’s like running into an old and respected enemy that once gave you a regular whipping in tennis or arm wrestling.
Why did these big ants disappear from the east half of Texas?
The story you hear most often is that the imported fire ants killed them off. Why not? Fire ants get credit for killing everything else that’s disappeared. I expect any hour to hear that those ants have caused the scarcity in Texas of Democrats and rainfall.
Near as I can figure, what we’ve always called the red ant in this state is what entomologists call the harvester ant. But during all my growing up I never ate, slept, worked or played very far from a bed of these ants, and I never heard them called harvesters. They were just red ants.
They were everywhere. We always had a couple of their beds in our backyard. We had them on the school ground. On baseball and football fields. I offer this testimony:
I was the catcher in a softball game played in the year 1936 when time was called because our pitcher, Butch Griffin, had red ants in his pants from sliding into third in the sixth inning.
A red ant bed, when well established, is a wide low mound on bare ground, with a comeand-go hole at its middle. The hole is surrounded by pebbles and seeds, or husks off seeds. Then three or four ant trails lead away from the bed, like octopus arms.
Books say these ants live on seeds, so they are not ranging around in search of human flesh to attack. But they are surely willing to attack it when they’re cornered.
Maybe you’ve heard the popular myth that makes this promise: If you stand barefooted in the middle of a red ant bed, you will not be stung if you hold your breath. I have a country cousin who swears he has done that very thing, and was not stung.
I’d like to say that I have actually seen my Cousin C.T. perform that ant trick. Because in my mind I have a picture of his bare feet in a large bed, and red ants by the dozen are crawling over his toes, and around his heels, and up his ankles, and not one has paused to sink a stinger into his hide.
But I’m afraid that my mind is the only place that picture exists, that it’s there only because C.T. himself put it there and said it was true.
In those times I’m talking about, a red ant sting didn’t send you to the doctor. There were plenty of folk remedies. Apply axle grease. Kerosene. Bacon fat.
Vinegar. Urine. What we usually did was just let the stings hurt until they quit.
I wonder if children still play with ants as they did in my early times. We used to capture red ants from two separate beds, put them together in a jar and watch them fight. Or we’d capture horny frogs, as we called the Texas horned lizard, and feed them red ants, their favorite meal.
But now the horny frog is headed down the same road as the red ant, toward extinction, and apparently from the same cause — fire ants.
Until recently I met every spring with friends out in the Hill Country beyond Austin on a fishing/camping trip, and I used to see horny frogs out there. But they always looked poor, dwarfed.
Not enough red ants left to make a lizard fat, I guess.