Where’s Harrogate when you need him?
Last night in pulling shut the large barn door to my shop, I noticed something black flicker down to the ground. A bat that probably was sleeping in the comforting dark behind the door that I woke up in daylight. I thought of mirrors, garlic, a crucifix, tieing up my hair, and Suttree’s Harrogate.
Very odd indeed, although the bat is common here and I have disturbed one once before within the folds of a patio umbrella. That was strange, to look up from beneath as I was cranking it open and see a silhouette against the sun. But what seems stranger to me now is that within a month I’d read of Harrogate’s great money-making plan to sell the bats for studies on rabies, and then a quite unplanned watching of Dracula one evening on tv. And closer now, within my touch a real one–for this morning he is still there, lying dead.
Or am I merely more aware?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
You have to be very aware to see bats at all. The ones we have here are absolutely silent in flight, and so fast I barely glimpse them before they’re gone.
We see them when we sit on our porch in the evening. The porch light attracts insects, so bats will come right up close to catch them, and can give the impression they’re flying right at a person. Something I don’t even have time to identify is flying right toward me, and then it’s gone. It startled the heck out of me the first few times. Now I know to watch for them.
I guess I’ve come to recognize a strange sound they make when flying close by. But I had to laugh at your experience because I swatted at a hummingbird once–near killed him–because all I heard was a loud buzzzzzz.