The tick’s white body wore an odd pattern of black splotches. An irregular form—oval like an egg, but pulled out of shape in two or three places—took up the center. Much smaller splatters, like ink shaken from a fountain pen, came close to being perfect circles.

Its arms dug into the skin of my white, soft stomach. Other people call them legs, but the grip demonstrated the will of hands. The tick was sucking my blood in contact as full as a baby latched on to a breast. The hypostome, the mouth with spears, had unsheathed from the jaws.

I pulled, once, and failed. I moved my middle finger and my thumb underneath the flattened body and pinched, my forefinger guiding the detachment, the lift up and away. I clamped my fingers tighter. I hustled from my bed into the bathroom, positioning my hand underneath the spigot and then the water. I released the pinch, and saw the tick still there, on my finger pad, for an instant, and then it was gone, into the flow, into the funnel descending the drain. I kept the water running. The tick would not find its way back up the pipe.

I remembered ordering in a bagel shop and afterwards, as I toted my brown paper bag, finding a woman I knew and her toddler, a boy in a high chair, his face smeared with cream cheese and the sticky residue of an earlier meal. I sat down with them and plucked out a whole wheat bagel from the bag, and then the toddler was leaning over, and he was grasping the ring of the bagel. I thought that it would be no problem to get the bagel away from him, and I tugged. I tugged and he tugged and he was winning. I could feel his strength through the bread, an iron leverage. The bagel was getting closer to him, and I yanked harder, and the bagel was coming closer to his mouth and his mouth was coming closer to the bagel. He bit. There was now saliva coating the bagel. I let go.

Another time, in another state, Indiana, I was a visitor to a home in the woods, a house with opium poppies in the garden and a fawn in the outdoor kitchen. I asked if I could take a baby bottle of milk or formula from my hostess and feed the orphaned fawn. She passed me the liquid and the fawn came next to me and sucked. The sucking was urgent and I clutched the bottle with both hands to keep it from falling. I had expected gentle nuzzling and big eyes and a tender feeding. The fawn, like the toddler, was fierce in his hunger.

In another season, I heard that the fawn grew too comfortable with people and their cars and roads. He was released to be with his own kind, but he kept coming back to the house. He was hit by a car on the nearby dirt road. He died.

Years later, I would learn that the young man who was once that toddler had a genetic defect. That rare defect limited his ability to take care of himself.

The fawn and the toddler had come from fierce beginnings. I had felt those beginnings. The fawn and the toddler launched by striving for their lives.

The tick left a red mark that disappeared within a June day or so. After the mark healed, a juvenile spider, as round as my scarlet seed beads, as grey-white as a faded pearl, crawled up my shirt. It displayed the same pattern as the tick.

I flicked the spider off me.

Within seconds, it was back, this time releasing a thread from its body. I picked up the thread and swung the spider to the floor. Then I turned on my computer. The tiny spider emerged from a crevasse between the keys.

It was not a second or a third spider, but the original one, a volleyball on a tether, swinging back to me each time I forced it away.

Leaving the computer, the spider skimmed my body, crawling fast.

I had to remind myself: Neither the toddler, the fawn, nor the tick had cared for my welfare. This spider held the same indifference, but while I had killed the tick, or thought I had, I was not going to kill the spider. I left spiders and their webs to collect in corners, emblems of time weaving for my benefit.

However, I had been sickened by a spider once. It had left two bite marks side-by-side behind my ear, and I had become delirious and sick for a day, poison in the liver, poison in my entrails. My digestion had been ruined for months.

My doctor and I discussed black widows; I had not seen the offender, but my superstitions awoke. There was a recent widow at work, human, who had sabotaged me, in secret, in after-sunset conversations with my employers. When she spoke at meetings, my lower belly ached. Her eyes shifted in their sockets when she was around me, moving left, right, left, right spasmodically, as if they were pinpointing a place to strike or a way to exit.

I offered a bagel, blood, milk, and an inflammation site. My sweat brought gnats.

In July, I entered, below vines. In the 18th Century quarry, a clearing nestled within a bowl of a rocks, light orange chanterelles ringed the northwestern side. The fan-shaped mushrooms, gilled and scalloped, had also emerged in the middle of the clearing, next to a cairn of greenstone.

Chanterelles are mycorrhizal fungi that tend to appear in July. “Mycorrhizal” means that they get their food from trees that use photosynthesis, growing in moist conditions near poplars. Here in the quarry there were tulip poplars and sycamores. The tallest sycamore had been axed down at one time; two trunks had grown from the stump, joined at the bottom.

I went first to the rim of chanterelles, and then to the cairn. Beside the chanterelles at the cairn, two Indian pipes arose—ghost plants. I had never seen either chanterelles or ghost plants in this place before. In fact, I had only seen ghost plants twice in my life. They need exact conditions to grow.

Ghost plants, or Monotropa uniflora, do not go through photosynthesis. They use the nutrients of mycorrhizal fungi attached to trees, and so it was likely that the orange chanterelles were feeding the white ghost plant under the ground. The ghost plant, having no chlorophyll, is pale and translucent. Its flower droops into the shape of an Indian peace pipe, thus its other name, “Indian pipe.” It is also called the corpse plant. When touched by people, the stem, leaves, and flower turn black, resembling rotten flesh.

Emily Dickinson placed an embossed illustration of ghost plants on her first book of poetry. Perhaps she identified with them, by nature sequestered and untouched.

Along the stalk, the leaves were shaped like peeling skin or shavings of parmesan. Black specks dotted the plant, and faint shades of pink. I took a twig to move the flower back to peer inside. Afraid to damage the flower, I didn’t see much.

The next day I returned with three teachers and ten second and third-grade children. The chanterelles were broken from their stems—all of them. The Indian pipe flowers had disappeared, though their inner stamen and one pistil had fallen as disks to the ground. One stalk was still planted in the earth; the other lay nearby. Both were blackened.

“I brought children here, yesterday afternoon,” a teacher said, “and to tell you the truth, I wasn’t paying attention to what they were walking on. They went a bit wild, searching for strips of bark.” He picked up the disk-shaped stigma. The yellow-tipped stamen stood undamaged. I peered into the circle.

It occurred to me that an animal might have trampled the mushrooms and the flowers, sniffing for food, but then I thought, No. An animal wouldn’t have torn every mushroom, each flower, and left eating nothing. Chanterelles were edible, delicious even, for humans and for woodland animals such as deer and squirrels. Even the eerie ghost plant wasn’t toxic. Traditionally, it was used as a nerve medicine.

I put the thin, broken stem of the Indian pipe into a sleeve of my backpack. Alone, I hiked to a new location and buried it at the foot of a giant sycamore tree. The ghost plant, a corpse, might resurrect there, a seed perhaps freed, fallen into the scales of its leaves. Pale parasite, you need peace and fungi.

Alexandria Searls runs an environmental education center in Virginia. She writes about human interactions with plants and insects, and her work has recently been published in "Progenitor Art and Literary Journal" and in "Cagibi."