35 '* suits him fine 



other predators, is not to be fooled. He merely takes a 

 firmer grip on the body and collects the discarded tail 

 later. Scorpions are also quite acceptable as tidbits. 



Inevitably such a creature is the center of many legends. 

 There seems to be no doubt that he takes the killing of 

 rattlesnakes in his stride, but old-timers insist that he some- 

 times first surrounds the snake with a circle of spiny cactus 

 joints so that the snake cannot get away. In fact, only a 

 few weeks ago a friend told me that one of his friends had 

 seen a slight variation on this performance when a road 

 runner walled the snake in with small stones before at- 

 tacking him. But like the milk snake milking a cow and 

 the hoop snake rolling merrily along with his tail in his 

 mouth, this remarkable performance seems never to be 

 witnessed by anyone with a professional interest in natural 

 history and it is usually a friend of a friend who was on 

 the spot. The situation seems much the same as that with 

 ghosts. You are most likely to see them if you are a simple 

 person and have faith. 



As a matter of fact, however, you do not always have 

 to be a simple or ignorant person to believe what the sim- 

 ple tell you. A well-educated man recently passed on to 

 me the old superstition that the Gila monster, our only 

 poisonous lizard, owed his venom to the unfortunate fact 

 that nature had not provided him with any orifice through 

 which the waste products of metabolism could be dis- 

 charged, and that poisons therefore inevitably accumu- 

 lated. One need only turn a Gila on his back to dispose 

 of this legend which is sufficiently improbable on the face 

 of it. Most of the people who repeat it have pointlessly 

 taken part in the attempt to exterminate these creatures, 

 but have obviously never looked at the bodies of their 



