Bichos

Coyote and I are each fascinated by animals that the other considers to be absolutely banal.

Last winter, while trying to have a snowball fight with the three square feet of melting white he found on top of a mountain (at which I snobbily yawned, begrudging it the title of snow), Coyote dropped the slush pile in his bare hands to point at the top of a naked tree.

"A squirrel!" he followed it with his index finger, tracing its ordinary flight along branches and down a pine trunk. Laughing, he pointed at more and more scrawny brown squirrels, their presence at Tahoe nothing special for me.
"I´m cold. Let`s go inside." I turned in my boots, refusing enthusiasm for both woodland creature and winter wonderland, and got my payback in the form of icy sludge that smacked the back of my neck and ran down the back of my sweater.
It wasn`t, it turns out, a vengeful Coyote, but rather a gray squirrel who, sloppily choosing an already overloaded pine branch as his landing pad, catapulted a snowball at me in his haste to remain afoot.

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When I was a kid Lolly and I used to hunt lizards and horny toads in the Nevada desert. We made contraptions out of 1-liter plastic bottles to catch the too-quick lizards, but the horny toads were so slow we could catch them with our bare hands. We used to hunt as many new reptilian pets as we could at the beginning of every summer, keep them fed on crickets and mealworms in a terrarium in the living room for a few months, then let them go to hibernate for the winter. Sometimes we kept a horny toad year-round, and always dubbed him Evvis. Their flat bodies would spend the winter slathered over the electric heat rock we kept in their box, but sometimes they would escape. One, Evvis II, I believe, who lived at my father´s office, managed to get out of his terrarium and fall behind the bookshelf it sat upon, where he remained, sideways, flattened between the pages of Human Resources manuals and the sheetrock wall, until, after umpteen declarations of "Evvis has left the building" he was discovered and returned to his home.

Here in the DF, even with my childhood exposure to reptiles, I am thrilled by every single lizard I see crawling in and out of the stones that line the sidewalks. All 50 of them, every day. It´s like being excited about spotting a mosquito in the summertime, like counting blades of grass on a football field. I interrupt Coyote´s stories to point out the flashes of eyes and tail, refusing to let him continue until he has expressed proper verbal appreciation of my find. I take breaks from reading on a rock wall outside the library on campus, and am happily swarmed with lizards, not longer or fatter than my pinky. I try to be discreet about catching them, since I can only imagine what I would think of a foreign student chasing a squirrel on campus at Berkeley. The few times I do get ahold of one I´ll hide it in my hand, imagine taking it home for a new pet ("And you shall be known as Princesa Lala!"), then let it free to wriggle back into a chink in the wall before it panics and drops its tail.