Many a fly has landed on my bare limbs this long summer, stretching out its minesweeper mouthparts to dab at my skin for something edible. Not thinking too hard about where those dirty feet have been, I tolerate them pattering about, sucking up, until the tickling sensation gets too much, and I shake them off.
What I worry about is the flies that don’t walk.
One of them came for me the minute I’d crossed a railway sleeper bridge over a still-damp ditch. Its flight had that perambulatory directness that I have come to know and dread: a diffident arc, then a concentric, purposeful circling, an aerial wrap around my legs, a staking out of animal flesh. Too late I felt something on my calf and kicked my heels like a horse in a paddock.
Thriving in this hot and often windless summer, horseflies have become a biting scourge throughout the land, the mosquitoes of drought. And, as with mosquitoes, the female is deadlier than the male, seeking a meal of animal blood so that she can grow her eggs.
Horseflies have a long notoriety as pain-inflicters. Vikings brought us the name “cleg”, Shakespeare and his contemporaries called them “gadflies”. In Gloucestershire these were the “horsestingers”. An old Scots verse declared: “Whaur the midgies mazy dance, clegs dart oot the fiery lance.”
Another one landed on my forearm and I raised the arm as if I was telling the time on a wristwatch. This wasn’t the common dull brown species of horsefly with a trident-shaped mouth that I have learned to swat, reluctantly, before it strikes me. This delta-winged fly was a striking insect, with smoky patches on its wings, and it often shows brilliant green or gold compound eyes. Cool shades for a hot bite.
I found myself studying its markings, as someone in the jungle might study an encroaching tiger’s stripes. There were vivid black and sky-blue bands running lengthways on its thorax. My eyes played over the stained glass membranes on its wings, admired their symmetries, toyed with the patterning.
Beauty banished thoughts of obliterating this insect and I tarried too long before blowing it off my arm. I still bear a tiny scar but not, thankfully, the maddening itch.
