Panic: We Are Hanging Here...

Day 38: It was a chilly day at Longmire, and Kevin had been down in the unheated facilities at the Volunteer Campground taking photos of "daddy-long-legs" harvestman spiders during his lunch break. He was anxious to show me the results of his search, but when he returned to the office, he was unhappy. "My cell phone has quit working," he explained. "It says it has 19% battery, but I can't get it to display the pictures." I suggested that the low temperature might be affecting it even as he was placing it in the charger on the desk beside my computer. For a minute or so, it simply sat there displaying a black screen. Then a page of white text appeared which was obviously an error message of some sort. Kevin leaned closer to it so he could read the fine print, and I heard a sharp intake of breath. "What's THAT?" he said. "'Panic: we are hanging here.'"

I had no idea what he was talking about, so I said, "You gettin' secret messages from your spiders?" He took the phone out of the cradle and turned it to face me. I lowered my glasses, the better to see the tiny print. "Panic: we are hanging here," it said. Neither of us could quite believe what we were seeing.

As I pulled out my camera to document this oddly appropriate dispatch, another ranger stuck his head in the door and asked what was going on. "Kevin's getting messages from spiders," I said as Kevin held the phone up where Casey could see it. The thunk of chin on floor was audible. His eyes widened as he did a double-take, and then all three of us broke out laughing.

In the warm room, the phone soon recharged and Kevin was able to email the photos to himself so we could view them on the computer: clusters of harvestmen hanging together for protection against the cold.