Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

It is in February that Dillard learns, finally, to “see” the egg cases of praying mantises. They’re small, and the color of dead grass, and now that she sees them, Dillard wonders how many countless ones she walked by in the past. Adult praying mantises are fierce, eating anything they can catch. Baby praying mantises are fierce, too, as Dillard learned in grade school. A teacher brought a mantis egg case into school in a mason jar and over the course of the morning, the mantises emerged. Unable to escape the jar and spread out as they would do in the wild, they fought and devoured each other. The victors also died of their injuries. Dillard remembers wanting to eat them so that all those lives wouldn’t have gone to waste. 

On her rambles through the countryside, Dillard collects several mantis egg cases. One comes from the same hill where she once watched a female praying mantis laying her eggs late in the summer. It was both repulsive and captivating. The female mantis was clinging upside down to a branch on a rose-bush, oblivious to everything. Its abdomen moved as if it had a mind of its own, squeezing out and carefully shaping the foamy egg mass. The father was nowhere to be seen; as many people know, female praying mantises eat their mates head-first before the egg-laying begins. Dillard visited that egg-case all winter and into the spring, but it disappeared when her neighbor mowed the hilly.

Returning home, Dillard ties the mantis egg cases and a moth cocoon to tree and bush branches in her yard in hopes of observing their hatching. As she does so, darkness “rises” in the valley. When Dillard goes inside, she’s thinking about the Polyphemus moth which her grade school class accidentally coaxed prematurely from its cocoon with the warmth of their hands on a January afternoon. Dillard’s friend had found the cocoon, and when it began to show signs of life, the teacher plunked it into the ubiquitous mason jar, which was far too small for the big moth. Because the moth was unable to unfurl its wings, they dried in place stuck to his back. Later, the teacher released the poor moth, and Dillard still remembers watching it walk resolutely toward its death. 

In the present, looking through her window, Dillard watches the shadows rise up the distant mountains. She recalls a story from Pliny about a girl who would trace her lover’s silhouette on the wall when he visited, later going over the tracing and carving it into a negative relief of his face. Her father, a clay artist, pushed clay into the relief, thus inventing clay modeling. Shadows are ominous, but also important. They “make sense” of the light, giving it distance and shape. And darkness can reveal, too. When the shadows reach the peak of the sky, the stars, which have been hidden all day from view, suddenly reappear.

Collecting the praying mantis egg cases gets Dillard thinking about insects, which to her mind do “one horrible thing after another.” Reading treatises by the early 20th century etymologist J. Henri Fabre, she finds stories about bee-eating wasps feasting on honeybees while themselves being eaten by praying mantises. It’s disconcerting to think that these tiny creatures, alien in both appearance and behavior, far outnumber not just humans but mammals in general. Given their numbers, Dillard resolves to find “a glimmer of companionship” with them. Once, a grasshopper landed on her windowsill. It looked utterly strange to her, until she noticed it breathing just as she herself breaths. And the sheer breadth of the insect kingdom shows how “profligate” nature is in experimentation.

Some insects show remarkable adaptability to a changing world. Others make one wonder how anything survives. Another story from Fabre describes how pine processionaries (small caterpillars that turn into woodland moths) travel in among the trees in an unbroken line, head to tail. Each caterpillar lays down a line of silk as it goes, and together they create a highway of silk. Fabre led some to the lip of a pot, then broke the line when enough had reached the lip to circle it completely. He then watched as, for days, without food or water, they grimly circle the pot. Occasionally, a few strike out in a new direction, but never far enough to find the pine needles Fabre has placed a few inches from the pot. They remained completely fixed in their pattern, showing not a glimmer of intelligence.

The truly terrifying thing in the world, Dillard asserts, is “the fixed,” the rote, meaningless repetition that stultifies progress and keeps people trapped going in circles. Life lies in change.

Two weeks earlier, Dillard recalls, she bundled up and went for a night walk along Tinker Creek—or Shadow Creek, as it becomes in the dark, especially on moonless nights. Usually, she takes comfort from the idea that the creek keeps running when she isn’t there, since it suggests nature’s munificence. But that night, it seemed ominous to hear its sounds without being able to see its familiar face. Now, two weeks later at the full moon, and after a day of happy work collecting egg cases and reading, the world seems beautiful once again.

It would be nice to be able to preserve these moments of beauty and grace, moments when the world seems like a good, well-ordered place. Once, when the creek was frozen over, Dillard watched the shadow of a pileated woodpecker flying overhead on its icy surface. She wishes she could have preserved the shadow on the ice. Shadow, those places where light doesn’t reach, represents mystery. And mystery is the last great frontier of human exploration.

On this evening, in lieu of a social activity like a game of cards, Dillard decides to bundle up and walk along the creek. Under the light of the full moon, the snowy landscape glistens and glows magically. She looks at the sky and thinks of the mysteries it holds in its depths. She wonders what the moon observed from its floating vantage point as the continents of the earth cracked and shifted. She feels cold, although she’s read that astronomer Kepler recorded once feeling the warmth of the reflected moonlight in mirrors.