The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories by Bryan Woolley

there.
    I wondered how he chose which ants he would flick. Why would he let a dozen or more pass by unharmed and then lash down like Fate upon the next? I wondered if the ants stung him on their way down his gullet.
    I wondered, then I shot him with my BB gun.
    He flipped onto his back, his short legs wiggled for a moment, and he died. I picked him up. Despite the thornlike horns on his head and back, his skin was incredibly soft. Especially the white skin of his belly. It was smoother than silk, and beautiful.
    I held him, examined him. Then, not knowing what else to do with a dead horny toad, I threw him down.
    I’m not proud of the memory. I’m not proud to say I killed many a horny toad in my time. It was something boys did in that place in those days. And horny toads were such an ordinary part of our landscape, more common than mockingbirds or armadillos or road runners or most other creatures that we associate with the Texas landscape. They were almost as common as the ants.
    We didn’t always shoot them. They were easy to chase down and grab, and a number of interesting things could be done with them. You could put a horned toad in your shirt pocket and release him in the classroom during study hall. You could stroke his soft belly and induce a hypnotic state that would freeze him like a statue. We called this “putting him to sleep.”
    Once in a blue moon you could provoke him into squirting blood from his eyes. People don’t believe horny toads do this unless they’ve seen it. It sounds too much like the tales that old men told little boys and little boys passed on to little girls to make them wrinkle their noses and say, “Ooooo!” We tried many times to make this happen.
    Then one day we angered or scared a horny toad enough, and it did. Two streams of blood, thin as threads, shot out of his eyes. It unnerved us, for we had been told that if horny toad blood hits your own eyes, you go blind. Years later I read that this actually had happened to a few people, and that they weren’t permanently blinded, but their eyes stung and were inflamed for a while.
    No one knows for sure why horny toads spew blood from their eyes, but in Mexico it’s one of the reasons they’re regarded as sacred: When they cry, they weep tears of blood.
    I kept my pet horny toads in a shoe box. Whenever I thought of it, I would capture 10 or 12 ants and release them into the box for my prisoners to eat. I didn’t know that a horny toad eats about 100 ants a day. Sometimes if one of my prisoners began to look peaked, I would let him go. But it’s hard to tell how a horny toad is feeling, so most of them died. I’m not proud of the memory.
    But I’ve learned lately that my friends and I weren’t the deadliest enemies that the Texas horned lizard, as it’s properly called —Phrynosoma cornutum to the scientists—has had to cope with. I’m happy to say that horny toads still thrive in our small West Texas town, as they thrived for more than 4 million years over nearly all of Texas. I’ve seen them out there in the Trans-Pecos, soaking up the morning sun, still zapping travelers on the ant highways.
    But when did you last see one in Dallas, or anywhere east of Interstate 35 and north of Interstate 10?
    â€œThey used to be common all around here,” said Dr. John Campbell, who teaches biology at the University of Texas at Arlington. “Up until the early ‘80s people used to bring them in all the time for identification. But they have really just disappeared.”
    Ken Seleske, curator of education at the Fort Worth Zoo, used to have a colony of four or five horny toads in his backyard watermelon patch. “I had a red harvester ant bed in my yard that I babied and took care of as a food source for them,” he said, “and I kept cats out of my yard. The horned lizards were there for years. Then they mysteriously went belly up and died on