Black Widow I hunt black widow spiders. When I find one, I capture it. I have found them in discarded car wheels and under railroad ties. I have found them in house foundations and cellars, in automotive shops and toolsheds, against fences and in cinder block walls. As a boy I used to lift the iron lids that guarded underground water meters, and there in the darkness of the meter wells I would often see something round as a flensed human skull, glinting like chipped obsidian, scarred with a pair of crimson triangles that touched each other to form an hourglass: the widow as she looks in shadow. A quick stir with a stick would trap her for a few seconds in her own web, long enough for me to catch her in a jar. When I walk the paved paths in a certain landscaped park in my hometown, a hot day will sometimes show me a sparkle that vanishes with any slight change of angle, and near it some windblown garbage will be lodged in the crags of a piece of granite or in the sandy dirt gathered by a prickly pear. A minute's investigation reveals that garbage, stone, cactus, and earth are all held together by an almost invisible web, at the corner of which the clawed tips of a black widow's sleek legs protrude from some crevice.

To catch a widow in this situation, I have to find a live insect and toss it into her web. Only after she has come out to kill the insect and is lost in the business of biting and wrapping do I have a good chance of catching her; otherwise, she is too quick to retreat to her hiding place. In the dry Oklahoma Panhandle, I found one under the threshold of my back door. It thrust its forelegs into the kitchen to threaten the pencil I prodded it with. Years later, when I lived in the humid Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, my wife and I had taken a new apartment, and a second before Tracy sat down on our new threshold I recognized those black lines, which might have been cracks in the cement, as a widow's legs: I yanked the spider out and captured it in a coffee can. I have found widows on playground equipment, in a hospital, in the lair of a rattlesnake, and once on the bottom of the lawn chair I was sitting in as I looked at some widows I had captured elsewhere that day. Sometimes I raise a generation or two in captivity. The egg sacs contain multitudes of pinpoint cannibals.

Growing for several days on the residual energy of the egg yolk they consumed before hatching, they molt before ever eating. The mass of them appears as a dirty cloud at the center of the egg sac, gradually expanding into a visibly moving stain that fills the sac. They live in their private sphere for about five days before they venture out into the world through a single, perfectly round hole chewed by one precocious sister, and as they leave they trail fine silk that gleams with the sun, the group of them producing a glimmering tangle like a model of an electron cloud, the empty sac its nucleus. After a day in that tight formation, they drift away from each other. They grow rapidly, the most successful eaters shucking a skin every few days. They begin as swirls of light brown and cream, then darken with each molt, resolving into brown with white spots. A white hourglass is soon clear on the belly. In the females, a pale orange hue dawns in the center of the hourglass with succeeding molts; the brown rapidly darkens.

The orange deepens to red, like a sunset, and spreads outward to infect the entire hourglass. As adults their black is broken only by the crimson hourglass and, depending on the individual, perhaps a few other sp.