Crouching in the jungle, sweat streaming from my face, I was waiting for a wild animal to rush at me from its hole.

Just hours before, I had landed in French Guiana in northern South America with photographer Nic Bishop. We’d flown over great mosaics of mangrove swamps, then huge climax forest. When you arrive here at night, we’d been told, what strikes you is the darkness. Only 150,000 people live in this country, a land the size of Indiana, and most of it is virgin tropical rainforest. But we had landed in the daytime, and immediately, with Sam Marshall, a biologist from Hiram, Ohio, we had set out to Trésor Réserve after our quarry.

 

 

I’d been to jungles on three continents before this to research my books, where I’d become acquainted with lions, tigers, and bears. But this trip was different. Again, the subjects of our expedition were top predators in their ecosystem, and among the largest and most imposing of their biological family group. But this time, we were looking for spiders.

“Queen of the Jungle” is how Sam described the species we sought: the largest tarantula on Earth, the Goliath birdeater. A big female can weigh a quarter pound. Her head might grow as big around as an apricot, her leg span stretch long enough to cover your face. And if the one Sam had located, in a silk-lined burrow that could stretch for twenty feet, did come rushing out, she might, in fact, cover my face.

The thought was disturbing. For although no tarantula’s venom is deadly to a healthy adult human, a bite from a Goliath birdeater’s half-inch black fangs will certainly break the skin. And if the spider chooses to inject its venom, which paralyzes its prey, the resulting nausea, sweating, and pain is enough to ruin your day.

Yet, lying on his belly in the dirt, his face inches from the hole, our red-haired host was calling to the spider imploringly. “Come out!” Sam cried. “I want to meet you!” Imitating the scuttling of an insect—because bugs, not birds, are the Goliath’s preferred prey—Sam wiggled a twig until he felt the spider grab it with the pedipalps, the food-handling feet at the front of the head. “She’s pretty strong!” he commented. In the light of his headlamp, he could see the spider was female. Female tarantulas are bigger than males and in some species can live for thirty years. He wiggled the stick some more. A hissing sound issued from the burrow. Goliath birdeaters create this menacing sound by rubbing together pale bristles on the inside of the front legs. That did it. Sam gave us perhaps one second’s notice before announcing, “Here she comes!”

The huge spider thundered out of the hole. Tipped with hooflike tarsi, each of her eight, seven-jointed legs thrummed loudly against the brittle leaf litter on the forest floor. Her head was the size of a small kiwi and her abdomen was as big as a clementine. This spider, Sam told us, wasn’t even full grown, and perhaps two years old. Yet the youngster rushed fearlessly forward, shooting forward four or five inches as suddenly as a shiver—only to face three monsters who together weighed more than four thousand times as much as she did.

Finding no prey, the tarantula sensibly returned to the mouth of her tunnel, all her spider senses on alert. Her eight eyes were vestigial, but no matter. She could smell with her feet. She could taste with special hairs on her feet and legs. And when she stood on the mat of silk she had spun from her own body at the mouth of her burrow, she could pick up the vibrations of the footfalls of the tiniest insect.

She knew we were there, Sam assured us. But she was unafraid.

It was as impressive as meeting a tiger. Yet I knew far more about tigers than spiders. I had of course seen plenty of spiders, but never really met one. This was about to change.

✧

“Strike! Strike! Strike!” As Nic and I squatted beside him, Sam narrated the scene he was able watch with his flashlight, looking down another Goliath birdeater hole. The spider was attacking his stick. “Backing up . . . strike . . .

“She’s not going to come out and play,” Sam finally said with disappointment. “She’s reared up and not very pleased with me.” When threatened, tarantulas stand tall on their hind legs and raise their front ones like black belts ready to execute a karate chop. They display their long black fangs; sometimes a drop of venom exudes from one tip.

Sam didn’t fear a bite—in twenty years of studying tarantulas, he’d never been bitten—but he withdrew his face from the entrance of the hole. “She might start kicking hairs,” he explained. Rather than bite, an irritated Goliath birdeater is apt to use the back legs to kick hairs off the abdomen, which, floating on air currents, will lodge in an assailant’s eyes, nose, and skin, and cause pain and itching that can persist for hours.

This Sam didn’t need, because, like us after our second day surveying birdeater burrows, he was itchy enough from the bites of other invertebrates, mainly ticks and chiggers. Though Sam assured us this rainforest was “more benign than the forest in Ohio,” where he had his spider lab, we were all consuming Benadryl and Exedrin each night to cope with the itching, swelling, and sore muscles.

Nic and I were finding our days as exhausting as they were exciting. “I ache all over,” I wrote in my field journal on our third day in French Guiana. “Drenched in sweat, covered with dirt, and we’ve found so many ticks on our bodies we don’t even bother to look for them anymore.” The birdeater dens were usually found on slopes forty-five degrees or steeper, on ground covered with giant slippery wet leaves and rotting logs that gave way beneath our feet. Though there were only two common plants with skin-piercing spines—one a palm, the other a vine—we often encountered them, and in the 90-degree heat and 90 percent humidity, even small wounds could get seriously infected fast. Every brown leaf threatened to contain a stinging wasps’ nest (Sam was stung on our second day), and in the litter and fallen trees, somewhere deadly fer-de-lance snakes were lurking.

So at the end of each day, it was a delight to retreat to Emerald Jungle Village, the nature center where we were staying. Run by the Dutch naturalist Joep Moonen and his wife, Marijke, it had whitewashed, tin-roofed guest quarters that featured fans, warm showers, and comfy mosquito-netted beds. Its extensive grounds were veined with paths through impressive gardens of native rainforest plants. Best of all, even amid such comfort, animals were all around us—even in our rooms. Gecko lizards slid like raindrops up and down exterior as well as interior walls. A toad inhabited our shower. One morning, before I got up, I watched from my bed as a small snake uncoiled and crawled across the floor from its hiding place in one of my shoes.

Naturally, Sam was eager to check every nook and cranny of our living quarters for possible tarantulas. He found one in the potted bromeliad on the tiled veranda just outside his room.

“Look! An avicularia!” Sam called to Nic and me one afternoon.

“Can I borrow your pen?” he asked me. He wasn’t going to make a note. He inserted the pen between the succulent’s serrated, pineapple-like leaves and gently prodded a tarantula the size of a child’s fist to step forward—into his waiting hand.

“Sy,” he said, “would you like to hold her?”

People aren’t born with a fear of spiders—all sorts of psychological tests have proven that—but arachnophobia is an exceptionally easy fear to invoke. You can quickly teach a young person or animal to fear anything, including a harmless flower. But in experiments, people (and monkeys) will learn to fear a spider or snake much faster than they will learn to fear a plant. And like most Americans, I’d grown up hearing lots of bad spider PR. Several times in my youth and adulthood, when I’d woken up in the morning with a hot red bump somewhere, doctors had diagnosed the problem (usually incorrectly, insisted Sam) as a spider bite—giving the false impression that spiders bite senselessly, without provocation, and, worse, that they’re lurking everywhere, even in your bed. When I was growing up, my mother had warned me about black widow spiders, whose venom is reportedly fifteen times as toxic as a rattlesnake’s. In Australia, I’d learned to be careful of the redback spider, a species closely related to black widows, which bites people far more often, as they particularly like dark places such as latrines, where they are sat upon. All of this was stored in my brain somewhere as Sam was offering to put a live wild tarantula into my hand.

 

 

I looked down to see that before I even answered, I had already stretched out my palm.

Sam nudged the back of her abdomen with my pen and she extended first one black hairy leg, then another, and another after another, until she was standing on my hand. The hooked tarsi at the tips of her feet felt vaguely prickly on my skin, like those of the Japanese beetles I have enjoyed holding since I was little. She stood for a moment while I admired her. She was a jet-haired beauty who looked like she had just had a fancy pedicure, the ends of her feet tipped in a bright, girly pink. For this reason, her species is known as the pinktoe tarantula. They’re exceptionally docile and seldom bite. Even their hairs are not usually irritating.

She began to walk. Slowly at first, stepping forward with her front legs, she crossed my right palm into my waiting left, just as my first dime-store turtle, Ms. Yellow Eyes, would do when I was a child. The tarantula probably weighed about as much as my turtle had.

And then something magical happened. Holding her in my hand, I could literally feel a connection with this creature. No longer did I see her as a really big spider; now I saw her as a small animal. Of course she was both. “Animals” include not only mammals but also birds and reptiles, amphibians and insects, fish and spiders, and many more. But perhaps because the tarantula was furry, like a chipmunk, and big enough to handle, now I saw her and her spider kin in a new light. She was a unique individual, and in my hand, she was in my care. A wave of tenderness swept over me as I watched her walk, softly, slowly, and deliberately, across my skin.

Until, that is, she started to speed up. What was she doing?

“They do speed up, and sometimes they bunch up and launch,” said Sam. When this happens in his lab, he advises students to step away, unless they want a flying tarantula landing on them. Though pinktoes build their silky retreats in the eaves of buildings, in shrubs, and in the curves of leaves on pineapple plantations, they know they belong in trees, and if they feel threatened, they usually head upward.

Now I was nervous—so nervous, in fact, that I began to shake. But my concern was not that a tarantula might run up my face. I felt faint with fear that if she launched, this beautiful, gentle animal might land on the tiled veranda and hurt herself. Since like all spiders she wore her skeleton on the outside, it was possible that a fall could break her exoskeleton. A beautiful wild creature might lose her life. And it would be my fault.

“I think I’d better put her back,” I told Sam. I returned her to his hand and he replaced her on the bromeliad, where she retreated to her silken home.

✧

That evening when we returned from the day’s den census, she was still there. “I think we have a pet tarantula,” Sam announced. He named her Clarabelle.

It was a fitting name for a pretty and elegant lady—which Clarabelle was. Tarantulas, Sam explained to us, are “tidy little homemakers,” lining their hideaways, whether in trees or in the ground, with fresh, dry silk. “They’re like regular Martha Stewarts!” Sam told us. Despite spiders’ reputations as dirty, nasty “bugs,” tarantulas are as immaculate as cats, carefully cleaning any dirt that falls on their bodies by meticulously drawing the hairs on their legs through the mouth, using their fangs like the teeth of a comb.

We grew increasingly fond of Clarabelle. Mornings and evenings, we’d check on her to make sure she was okay. Tarantulas are well armed against their enemies, but some do succumb. Occasionally, an agile-fingered mammal—a particularly stoic monkey or an exceptionally tough coatimundi—will withstand the shower of irritating hairs to fish a tarantula from her hole and eat her. So will certain birds. Female pepsis wasps, hummingbird-size flying insects, sting tarantulas into paralysis; then they lay eggs in their flesh so that when they hatch, the larvae can feast on the living spider. I sometimes worried about Clarabelle during the day, and was always relieved when we’d return to find her safe in her bromeliad.

I wondered: Did Clarabelle know us? “Spiders are individuals like everyone else,” Sam assured us. He’s had pet tarantulas since he was thirteen, and in his lab in Ohio, he had about five hundred of them. Through the years of interacting with them, Sam learned that within the same species, some individuals seemed calm and others nervous. Some changed their behavior over time and appeared to grow calmer in his presence. Later, with Nic, I’d visit his tarantula lab. One of his students noted that something unusual happened when Sam walked in. Even though many of his tarantulas were naturally blind, when Sam—and only Sam—entered the room, five hundred tarantulas invariably turned in their terrariums and oriented toward him.

✧

As the days passed, it seemed that Clarabelle was growing calmer as we handled her. This could have been, of course, that we were growing more used to her. Perhaps she was inadvertently teaching us to be calm and responding to our increasing ease in holding a spider. All three of us enjoyed interacting so intimately with this small wild animal. She made us feel even more at home at Emerald Jungle Village.

One day Nic tossed her a katydid and took her portrait as she was eating it. Most spiders, after injecting prey with paralyzing venom, pump fluid from their stomach into the victim to liquefy the meal, then suck it dry and toss the skin away. Tarantulas do it differently. Clarabelle ground up her food with teeth behind her fangs. Though I felt bad for the katydid—a relative of the friendly, familiar cricket—I loved that we could give something to Clarabelle. For she herself had much to give, and was about to become a spider ambassador.

✧

The morning of our last full day in French Guiana, Sam urged Clarabelle into a plastic deli carton. We were taking her with us on our last trip to Trésor Réserve, after which she would be released back at the potted plant where she was found. But first Sam had organized a meeting for her with some people who, like her, were small but important.

By the head of the trail leading into the jungle, they were waiting: nine children from the local school, ages six through ten, had come from the nearby village of Roura. Joep introduced them to Sam in French. “On voit aujourd’hui Dr. Marshall . . .” But Sam was eager to introduce the real guest of honor. Removing the deli carton from his backpack, he carefully peeled off the lid. One hairy leg arched over the lip of the container, and then another and another, until Clarabelle stepped calmly onto Sam’s palm.

“Qui veux la toucher?” he asked the children.

Who wants to touch her?

For a moment, nobody spoke. One little girl had earlier confessed she was afraid of spiders. But then a ten-year-old boy in a baseball cap raised his hand. Sam showed him how to extend his palm to let Clarabelle step aboard. She moved so delicately and deliberately that soon nine little palms stretched out to hold her—even the little girl who said she was afraid.

Nic took many photos for our book that day. I still love to look at the hands of those kids: brown hands, pink hands, gently cupped to welcome the footfall of a creature that some of them had only moments earlier viscerally feared. In one photo, three girls huddle together to let Clarabelle stroll across their skin. Their eyes look down on the spider with concentration and reverence; their faces are relaxed with the sense of peace and wholeness that only holding a small, charming animal can bring. Now they saw a wild creature in their native forests in an entirely new way. That day, I heard a little girl in neat pigtails murmur, almost under her breath, “Elle est belle, le monstre.” She is beautiful, the monster.

✧

By allowing me to handle her, Clarabelle had opened to me a spidery world I’d previously never appreciated. Her great size was only the most obvious aspect of her magnificence. Like all spiders, she possessed astonishing superpowers. Since she wore her skeleton on the outside, she could shed her outer covering—and even the lining of her mouth, stomach, and lungs—when she needed to grow. If a leg was injured, she could pull it off, eat it, and grow a new one. From her own body she could pull silk, and by this action transform what began as a liquid to a solid softer than cotton but stronger than steel.

Creatures with these same gifts were so common at home that I had passed them without notice. In our basement in Hancock, we had cellar spiders with elongated bodies and elegant legs, who hung upside down and vibrated their webs disconcertingly if you touched them. In the woodpile, we often found jumping spiders, who had excellent vision and seemed to notice us and leap aside. We had many spiders living in the barn, and when one would inevitably weave a web by Christopher’s pen, naturally it reminded me of a scene from Charlotte’s Web. Of course, I would never have hurt a spider. In our farmhouse, I didn’t vacuum enough to endanger their webs. If a spider appeared in a bothersome spot—in the tub, or on my pillow, for instance—Howard or I would carefully capture the creature in a yogurt cup and transport it outside.

But perhaps because they were so small, perhaps because they were so common, or perhaps because they were invertebrates, with lives so unlike the birds, mammals, and reptiles I knew so much better, I’d never before given spiders much thought.

Now, thanks to Clarabelle, even the most ordinary corners of our home were freshly enchanted. The world, I realized, brimmed even fuller with life than I had suspected, rich with the souls of tiny creatures who may love their lives as much as we love ours.