High Desert

Woman with permission of Swift Creek Photos
Spider: Falln Stock

Dr. Tina Vinmenthes enjoyed the high desert of Nevada. There was a peace about the place that she couldn't find in her office at the university or in her crowded circle of friends and colleagues. That her research area was the arachnids of the same desert was an added bonus. Classes had ended three weeks earlier. She'd, of course, gotten her grades together, submitted the results to the registrar, and dealt with the procession of students wheedling for enough to get to the next grade break. Then she'd packed her backpack tent and driven to her research station in the desert.

She enjoyed watching the various arachnids as they pursued their lives, hunting, fighting for territory, making the next generation. It was all so fascinating how things in the ecology held together despite the ever increasing encroachment of human civilization. Whether toxins that arrived airborne from across the mountains, the disturbance caused by careless off-roaders, or even the litter left by uncaring hikers, it was all the same to Tina.

Occasionally, she'd run across something new and that would be more than a little exciting. She'd discovered a new subspecies of one of the scorpions in the area and found a blind cave scorpion the previous season. They'd both made good papers of course and her first act on returning to her station was to release her specimens (or their progeny). She hated the necessity of collection specimens for study but realized that they couldn't adequately be described from field observations.

That morning had been special in many ways. She'd been out hiking since before the sun came over the horizon. Since most of her favourite creatures were nocturnal or twilight creatures, Tina did her explorations to follow their patterns rather than her own. The heat of the day was for sleeping in her tent. The reason for her excitement had been simple. She'd discovered a tarantula that she was sure was a new species. It had a strange greenish white dust that appeared to come from the flaking of the creatures hairs. That was something that she knew had never been described in any arachnid. The dust had made it slippery and Tina had taken considerably longer to corral and contain the creature in one of the larger specimen jars from her backpack.
In the process, of course, she had gotten her hands completely covered by the dust. The desert lacks water and Tina brushed the powder off into a small specimen vial but couldn't do a proper job of cleanup until she returned to her camp by one of the only still wet pools in the area. She looked forward to doing a detailed description when she got back to camp in an hour or so.

When she got back into the shade of her camp by the pool, she discovered that the creature wasn't exactly new. It was a common enough tarantula except for the strange dust. It did, however, create the dust from the breakdown of its continuously growing hairs. She wasn't as certain now that it was a new species so much as a new variant. Only time would tell. When she got back to civilization in a week or so, she'd place her specimen in the habitat cages and make a proper investigation. But even a new variant was interesting so Tina wasn't entirely disappointed.

The desert heat was spilling over the top of the small canyon and Tina decided it was time to catch up on the sleep that she'd given up to do her nocturnal rounds. She shook out the bedding on her cot (you couldn't be too careful ... critters were always looking for safe places to hide) and sometimes a new specimen might present itself closer to home by hiding in her covers.

Tina fell asleep thinking about her strange dusty tarantula and, not too surprising, found her dreams filled with tarantulas. In several of her dreams, she was chasing oddly shaped or coloured tarantulas to put them into a jar. In one of her dreams, an overly large tarantula was returning the favour. Several extremely vivid dreams were about Tina herself as a tarantula, hunting the high desert.

Tina awoke when the sun's heat left the canyon. Though she had only had four hours of sleep, she could get by on that for the three weeks she was on her yearly collecting expedition. Somewhere, in her fevered dreams, Tina had kicked her covers off as she could see them lying against the table beside her cot. She reached out to snag them from the canvas floor only to discover that her arm was furry. And that furry was strangely like that of the tarantula she'd captured that morning.

Her sleep-fogged puzzlement quickly turned to horror when she rolled out of the cot. Instead of the normal pair of legs, one by one eight hairy legs rolled from the cot to land on the floor. Quickly taking stock, Tina did a quick check. Sure enough, things definitely had changed. She was some kind of strange half-woman, half-tarantula creature. Quickly though, her initial shock abated. Her students and colleagues alike called her the "Tarantula Woman" for her passion for the great hairy spiders. Now, her form matched her nickname. She wondered how the university would handle a spider teaching the Desert Ecology Course.