Davis McCombs

Summer hooks its anchor on a jag of Ozark sandstone and, high above us, groans to a standstill. It is the middle of June. Some afternoons a school of thunderheads will swim along the horizon, enormous shadows sliding over the distant hills and cell towers, and sometimes, like jellyfish, the clouds will drop down stinging tentacles of rain. It won’t be long now until I’ll see the season’s first tiger beetle—usually at dusk and often on the sun-baked surface of our road. It is always a thrill. How can any living creature be that green? And how can it be moving so fast, a metallic blur on six spindly legs? The fastest tiger beetle has been clocked at a speed which, translated to our human scale, is over 400 miles per hour. If you watch the beetle, you’ll notice that it will pause occasionally in its immense hurry. It does this to regain its bearings. Tiger beetles, I’ve read, are moving so fast they go temporarily blind. …