Free The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly Page B

think about.
    I relaxed and felt a lot more friendly toward the snake, which seemed to relax too; it tasted the air with its tongue. How had he ended up in my chest of drawers, so far from his natural home? The poor thing was no doubt mighty confused. I’d have to repatriate him to his normal environment under a rotten log where he could make his living on mice and other small unfortunates. I reached for him, and he hissed at me. I pulled my hand back. No point in being bitten, even with tiny teeth and no venom.
    I cast about for a bag or a sack in which to transport him. I pulled my pillow slip from my bed and turned back just in time to see the tip of his tail disappearing into a gap in the corner baseboards.
    Oh, wonderful. I sincerely hoped he could find his own way out of the house, for even though I was no longer afraid of him, he wasn’t my idea of the perfect roommate.
    As I was drifting off to sleep the next night, I heard a faint scratching noise. I opened my eyes to see the snake gliding across the floor through a patch of moonlight, a tiny inert bundle in its mouth, possibly a mouse, scared stiff. My heart went out to the little creature, and for a moment, I entertained the idea of trying to save it, but the snake was only being a snake, after all, and deserved his dinner like the rest of us. This was an example of “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” in the words of one Mr. Alfred Lord Tennyson, a famous writer whom Granddaddy often quoted. It meant that animals had to both eat and be eaten in turn on the great revolving wheel of life and death. And there was nothing to be done about it.
    My next lesson served to point this out. Granddaddy called me into the library and told me it was time for my first dissection. We would start with the large earthworm I’d been saving for this very lesson. He said, “Galen and the early natural philosophers thought you could understand anatomy and physiology simply by studying an animal’s exterior. All nonsense of course, but this misguided notion persisted for centuries. It wasn’t until the 1500s that Andreas Vesalius finally showed that the interior is at least as important and interesting as the exterior. His early dissections of man are still marvels of both Art and Science. Do you have your specimen?”
    I held up a canning jar containing an inch of damp soil and the giant night crawler I’d been saving. Despite all my efforts to remain detached and objective, I did feel a little bad about killing this nice big worm. Living on a farm, I had of course seen plenty of plucked turkeys and skinned rabbits and butchered hogs, but Alberto generally dispatched these creatures. They were killed so we could eat them. Their demise was necessary for our own survival. And even though I was dissecting a lowly worm, and even though I had probably inadvertently killed and maimed hundreds of them beneath my feet over the years, I was now going to kill one intentionally to satisfy my curiosity. I felt that apologies were in order.
    â€œSorry, worm,” I whispered, “but it’s for Science, you know.”
    The worm had no vote in the matter and remained silent.
    Granddaddy said, “There is no need for cruelty. Be sure you dispatch your subject as humanely as possible but in a way that will also preserve its architecture.”
    â€œHow do I do that?”
    â€œYou will need to immerse it in a beaker of ten percent alcohol for a few minutes. You will find what you need in the laboratory. Once you have done that, we will prepare your dissecting tray.”
    I carried my worm out to the laboratory and found bottles of alcohol and water. I mixed up nine parts of water to one part of alcohol and dropped in the worm. It twitched only once and sank slowly to the bottom. Granddaddy joined me a few minutes later. From under the counter, he pulled out a shallow metal pan and a package of wax. He led me through the slow process of melting the