Bizarre hunting ....

Last week was an interesting one. I and my friend ventured into a new task - hunting scorpions. Yes, I was feeling jittery too.

My friend lives in Phoenix, which is very much like a desert, and his house is located less than a mile away from a mountain. Scorpions are galore in the mountain and crawl their way into a cozy home. One can easily find a couple of scorpions here and there daily in my friend's house. With a six month baby boy, who has just started to crawl, my friend had few options at hand than to get rid of the scorpions. He tried several ways to get rid of them - sticky traps, insecticides, etc. Nothing seemed to shun the deadly lizards away!!

Looking for ideas, he stumbled across the concept of black-light - a black-light is an incandescent light that will make phosphorescent object glow in the dark. Scorpions glow under this light. He liked the idea and bought a black-light, along with a pair of gloves, and hammers. He asked my help and I agreed!

We dressed up from tip to toe - full sleeved T-shirts, sneakers, long jeans and gloves - and scavenged the house from inside turning the lights off, turning the black-light on we searched the corners, walls, boundaries and covered areas in living room, bed rooms, halls, bath rooms and closets. To my disappointment and my friend's delight, not a single scorpion was to be found.

At 10.00 PM we ended searching the home, and embarked upon searching outside of the house. We turned the black-light on the walls, grass, containers and covered areas. Even after searching almost three fourths of the outside area, we could not find a scorpion.

In our final round of search, we were looking on a wall that was close to a swimming pool. I was standing on a small basement that was built around an elevated circular area, which had few small plants. Close to my right leg was a small shrub that was dry and almost ready to die. My friend cautioned me that scorpions tend to dwell in wet and damp areas.

In a flash, when my friend moved the black-light towards the shrub, we saw something bright on the sidewalls of the basement. We were reluctant to accept that it was a scorpion. The object was different from others. It was long, wide and grainy looking. It seemed like a spider web. It was not moving. A closer look revealed it's true nature - what was web like were legs. What was long was the tail and wide were the sprawled legs. It was indeed a scorpion. Hurraaa!!

I jumped off the basement in one scoop and wasted no time in wielding the mighty hammer - albeit for the first time that night. Intimidated by it I missed the first shot. Scorpion shuffled away, but it was dumb. It retraced the path back to where it was. I took couple more shots at it and finally hit it - bingo!! Our score was one!!

Further search did not unravel any more scorpions. My friend was happy that the whole hunt revealed less trouble in his house in the form of only one scorpion, though I was little disappointed to have ended the hunt at about 11.30 PM with a score still at 1.