The Inferno

A few years ago, I lived in a loft close to the Metrotown area. This house was an older house and I lived in the attic. My friends co-rented the house with me and shared the other bedrooms below and in the attic. Often, as I lay in the dark, drifting off to sleep, I heard vague scrabblings on the floor and in the walls but paid them no attention, being unconcerned about nocturnal noises.

One day, I found our cat chasing a huge spider down the stairs, but before I could stop him, he’d killed the spider and eaten him. Thinking it was just an irregular incident, I ignored it as well.

One summer afternoon, as I sat at my computer desk in my room, something scuttled past my bare foot and stopped in the middle of my room. I stared at it and saw an enormous spider. I seized an empty bowl off my desk and dropped it over the spider, who was now trapped. Realizing that I had to find out if it was venomous or not, I decided to kill it by not destroying it completely. I fetched a can of RAID and shoved the nozzle into the upturned bowl, simply gassing it to death. I put the body in ice in a tupperware container and stuck it in the freezer. Before doing that, I took some pictures, so that people would believe how big this spider was. You can see how large it is, its leg-span equals that of a regular DVD case.

There are sites on the internet where trained entomologists identify bugs for you, based on pictures, but these helpful scientists are inundated with requests from all over the world. I looked for spiders with similar characteristics:  the spindly legs, huge diameter, the boxing-glove fangs and my research led me to believe that the specimen I’d frozen was a hobo spider. Not good! They’re one of the few venomous spiders in the Pacific Northwest and their bite causes deadly necrosis. I won’t post pictures, but you can quickly google it and be revulsed.

I looked around on the BC Forestry site (what are my taxes for, after all?) and emailed the resident entomologist, who happened to be on Vancouver Island. At his behest, I couriered him the frozen spider and he got back to me in a couple of weeks. Good news! It wasn’t a hobo spider, but the giant European house spider instead. Having the GEHS spider around is good, since it competes with and drives the hobo spider away.

I opened the little door leading into the attic from my room and it was a scene out of the Alien franchise. Huge cobwebs hung from the beams, while spiders scurried around in dark corners. I should mention that my roommates are severe arachnophobes and on being confronted with the frozen specimen and realizing that there were more there, they simply left the house and wouldn’t return for a few hours. Once they found out there was a giant arachnid factory in the attic, they bought me crates of RAID and asked me to empty them in the space beyond the little door.

We all moved out soon after, but at least now I knew the source of the scrabblings noises and furtive rustles in the dark. Click to enlarge the pictures below.

I’ve always been fascinated with people and the animals they resemble. Perhaps you had a friend in childhood who was dull and bovine, like an ox. Or keen of wit and smart, like a monkey. Maybe even roly-poly and cuddly like a koala or a panda. What about a good dependable friend, who embodied all the best canine attributes? Or maybe you knew someone who was so silly and irrational and cooked up the most asinine schemes. Ok I think you get the point. This led me to catalogue all the animal-like adjectives I could find at an early age.

Here is a partial reproduction of that list, probably useful to no one but me. It’s the word, followed by the source animal and the human connotation:

Asinine - from ass, donkey – stupid
Canine - from dog – no real human equivalent, except for dependability, reliance and so on
Bovine - from cows, bovids – slow, dull-witted, thick
Equine - from horse (Equus) – like dog, no real human equivalent
Vulpine - from fox – crafty
Ranine - from frog – no human equivalent
Leonine - from lion (Leo) – regal, majestic
Ursine - from bear (Ursa) – no human equivalent
Lupine - from wolf (Lupus) – savage
Porcine - from pig – fat, rotund
Feline - from cat (Felis) – stealthy
Vespine - from wasp (Vespid) – no human equivalent
Piscine - from fish (Pisces) – open-mouthed, dull-witted
Viperine - from viper – venomous, deadly
Elephantine - from elephant – mammoth, huge
Zebrine - from zebra – anything striped in black and white like its namesake
Tigrine - from tiger – no human equivalent
Lapine, Leporine – from rabbit (Lapin) – timid, shy
Aquiline - from eagle – well defined, sharp and hooked, like the eagle’s beak
Musteline - from weasel (Mustelid) – sneaky

For the sake of purity, I’ve only included words suffixed with -ine. This is the reason for ignoring simian and avian and so on.

Of course, the words are perfectly acceptable as epithets without the human connotation. That’s all I can remember for now, if anyone remembers any others not on this list, and I’m sure there are tons more, let me know and I’ll add them to the list.