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By Linda W. Curtis

Well, of all things! My husband was on a walker and his foot in a boot after surgery to ease his hammer toe. As he walked, small black debris fell out of the holes on the lower metal legs, where the adjustment knobs were for raising or lowering the height of the walker.

Every day I cleaned up the trail of debris, small and black or brown, stringy stuff. I finally realized on the 10^th day, the debris wasn’t lessening.

That’s when the lightning bolt of AHAH! struck me. The hunting spiders do not make webs, but instead stash their catch in holes, and they hide in the holes, too. My husband was walking with a spider all day, and at night it was roaming the house catching small creatures and stuffing them in the holes.

But which one? I shook the walker, but nothing fell out.

As a fan of mystery novels, I knew how to flush the suspect into revealing itself. I had experience with this. I captured a scarab beetle from her deep tunnel by placing a banana skin in a plastic bag I put  over the top of the sand pushup.

Sure enough, the next morning the beetle was still in the bag and I had a rare prize of the deep digger scarab beetle for my bug collection.

So, that night I put a small piece of hamburger in four plastic bags, and secured them at the top of the walker legs. Much to my surprise, a three-inch-long centipede lay in one of the leg’s bags the next morning. I quickly put the bag into the refrigerator to slow the leggy creature to photograph it and later release so not to traumatize it.

The next night, I tried a different leg of the walker and now the  bags each held a piece of Spam. Next day, nothing. Three times and out, I thought. What could entice a spider? Then I realized, of course, red meat.

I went to my bug collection and  selected several large beetle specimens. I made bilateral incisions and stuffed each with a tweezer-full of hamburger.

The next morning, not one but two spiders were at work on the stuffed hard-shell beetles, and I took them outdoors and released them.

Was I done? No, one more leg. What arthropod would I find next? Well, no arthropod, but a small newt or anole. It fit in that quarter inch hole by folding its agile legs inward. I read they were predators of insects and spiders so reasoned it would be our new watch-dog anole and let it stay.

— Linda W. Curtis

Linda W. Curtis is a botanist who has written extensively about Carex sedge plants in books and scientific articles. A second edition of her debut fictional book, Bench Therapy, which includes "48 laugh-out-loud or at least chuckle-out-loud stories, will be published soon.