The High-Stakes Choice Between Sunday Dinner and a Spider

Growing up way out in the country, long before the convenience of modern grocery stores, putting food on the table wasn’t a matter of driving to town. It was a matter of resourcefulness, patience, and a lot of hard work. For my mom and her brother, providing meat for the family dinner often meant grabbing a firearm, stepping out into the dark Alabama woods, and going rabbit hunting.

In those days, they didn’t hunt just for sport or to pass the time. If they wanted meat to go with the garden vegetables and biscuits, they had to go out and harvest it themselves. Every single trip into the woods carried the weight of a simple reality: no success meant an empty platter at breakfast or supper. And let’s face it, nobody wanted to sit down to a plate of plain biscuits and imaginary gravy when they could be having fried rabbit.

Because they were hunting at night, they relied on carbide lamps to cut through the thick, pitch-black darkness of the woods. A carbide lamp is a unique piece of history. It works by dropping water onto calcium carbide pellets, which creates acetylene gas. When you light that gas, it produces a steady, brilliant white flame. Miners used them, and for a long time, hunters did too. Attached to a cap or held in the hand, the lamp would cast a sharp, bright beam into the brush, bouncing back the reflections of whatever was hiding in the shadows.

That bright beam was essential for spotting game, but it also created a very specific, high-stakes problem.

When you shine a light into the woods at night, the eyes of nocturnal creatures glow back at you. If you are tracking a rabbit, you look for two distinct, dull red points of light shining out from the brambles and briars. The trouble was, rabbits weren’t the only creatures in the Alabama woods whose eyes reflected that exact same shade of red.

Wolf spiders and fishing spiders, which grew quite large in the deep woods, have eyes that reflect a bright, piercing red under a carbide light. From a distance of twenty or thirty feet, a spider sitting on a low-hanging branch or a rotting stump looked identical to a rabbit hunkered down in the brush. You would see two small, ruby-red embers burning in the dark, and your instinct would tell you to raise your gun.

Now, nobody wants to come face-to-face with an eight-legged monster in the dark to begin with, but pulling the trigger on a false alarm was a luxury they simply could not afford.

Back then, ammunition was incredibly scarce and expensive. Every single shell or cartridge was counted and accounted for. Wasting a shot on a spider didn’t just mean a loud noise and a spooked woods; it meant a tangible loss of a precious resource. You couldn’t just run to the hardware store on a whim to buy another box of shells if you blew your supply on arachnids. If you fired a shot, you absolutely had to make it count. You needed to bag a rabbit, not a spider. Besides, a spider biscuit sounds terrible, no matter how much pepper and gravy you try to mask it with.

This meant my mom and her brother had to develop an incredible amount of discipline and sharp eyesight. They couldn’t just shoot at the first flash of red they saw. They had to pause, study the light, and look for subtle clues:

A rabbit’s eyes would occasionally blink, or the twin red dots would shift slightly as the animal turned its head. A spider, on the other hand, would sit perfectly still, staring back with an unblinking, eerie intensity, probably wondering why two humans were shining a headlamp at it.

The hunters also learned to judge the height of the reflection. A red glow sitting four feet off the ground on the side of a pine tree trunk was almost certainly a spider waiting for prey—unless Alabama had developed a rare breed of tree-climbing rabbits that nobody told them about—while a reflection tight to the dirt or nestled deep inside a blackberry thicket was far more likely to be the supper they were looking for.

They would stand frozen in the dark, the faint hiss of the carbide lamp filling the quiet air, smells of sulfur and damp earth surrounding them, straining their eyes to tell the difference between a meal and a mistake. It required a level of patience that few modern hunters have to practice today.

That tension—the need to pull the trigger balanced against the absolute necessity of saving ammunition—defined those nightly trips. It was a hard way to grow up, but it taught them lessons about resourcefulness, focus, and precision that stayed with them for the rest of their lives. When they did finally make the shot, knowing for certain it was a rabbit, the reward was a heavy game bag and a frying pan full of meat for a family that appreciated every single bite.