I had another
smaller, coal-black fellow who went into a perfect ecstasy of anger and
ferocity every time any one came near him. He would stand on his hind
legs and paw wildly with fore legs and palpi, and lunge forward fiercely
at my inquisitive pencil. I found him originally in the middle of an
entry into a classroom, holding at bay an entire excited class of art
students armed with mahl-sticks and paint-brushes. The students were
mostly women, and I was hailed as deliverer and greatest _dompteur_ of
beasts when I scooped Eurypelma up in a bottle and walked off with him.

But this is not telling of the sundown fight that Mary and I saw
together. We had been over to the sand-cut by the golf links, after
mining-bees, and were coming home with a fine lot of their holes and
some of the bees themselves, when Mary suddenly called to me to "see the
nice tarantula."

Perhaps nice isn't the best word for him, but he certainly was an
unusually imposing and fluffy-haired and fierce-looking brute of a
tarantula. He had rather an owly way about him, as if he had come out
from his hole too early and was dazed and half-blinded by the light.
Tarantulas are night prowlers; they do all their hunting after dark, dig
their holes and, indeed, carry on all the various businesses of their
life in the night-time. The occasional one found walking about in
daytime has made a mistake, someway, and he blunders around quite like
an owl in the sunshine.

All of a sudden, while Mary and I were smiling at this too early bird of
a tarantula, he went up on his hind legs in fighting attitude, and at
the same instant down darted a great tarantula hawk, that is, a Pepsis
wasp. Her armored body glinted cool and metallic in the red sunset
light, and her great wings had a suggestive shining of dull fire about
them. She checked her swoop just before reaching Eurypelma, and made a
quick dart over him, and then a quick turn back, intending to catch the
tarantula in the rear. But lethargic and owly as Eurypelma had been a
moment before, he was now all alertness and agility. He had to be. He
was defending his life. One full fair stab of the poisoned javelin,
sheathed but ready at the tip of the flexible, blue-black body hovering
over him, and it would be over with Eurypelma. And he knew it. Or
perhaps he didn't. But he acted as if he did. He was going to do his
best not to be stabbed; that was sure. And Pepsis was going to do her
best to stab; that also was