a cautionary tale

Rimsky the dog was outside this morning on a long lead in front of the house when he started to bark. Seeing that his lead was caught -- it was wrapped around a bush at the edge of the woods -- I went out to try and free him. As I reached him and tried to attach his leash, I felt a hard jab on my hand that was like a cross between a sharp sting and a powerful blow. I realized that Rimsky was battling a whole battalion of bee-like insects and one of them had hit my hand hard. Either Rimsky himself or his lead had gone right over their ground nest at the base of the bush and dozens -- not to say hundreds -- of angry vespids had come charging out of the nest hole to attack him. Fortunately his thick hair protected his body and any insect that tried to land on his snout was instantly snapped up -- or at least chased off by his sharp teeth. It was quite a sight to watch him twisting and turning, pawing and snapping, as he did battle with his tormentors. Without being stung again, I managed to get the leash on him and lead him far enough away from the nest so that I could disconnect the lead and bring him back around to the house by a different route. I don't think he was bitten badly but for quite a while afterwards he kept brushing his snout with his paws and also licking his paws.

After I got him back in the house, I had to go out and pull in the lead from a safe distance (fortunately it was attached to the base of a tree quite far from the site); no way was I going to test the wrath of those insects even at a modest distance. The nest is so close to the path down to the pond that I am amazed that I never noticed it before. Perhaps when I go down early in the morning, the insects -- I am almost certain they are yellow jackets which always seem to appear in the late summer -- are still not active.

One of my indelible childhood memories (I must have been nine or ten years old) was walking into one of these ground nests and, on being attacked, running back to the house screaming with the little stingers coming after me in a fury. The way I remember it I had a hundred stings. But, bad as the stings were, they was nothing compared to the aftermath where, with a whole passel of relatives gathered round (including, as I remember it, young female cousins of various ages who came running in to watch), I had to shed all my clothes to have calamine lotion liberally applied all over my miserable little body. Even to this day, I can remember the sheer ignominy of it! Only in retrospect did I realize how lucky I was not to have had an allergic reaction.

Eric Salzman