I assembled their gear beside the car while they munched bananas and Pop-Tarts. The next order of business was to teach them how to bait live night crawlers. We live in the city, so their experience at handling wild animals of any sort was, shall we say, limited. I assured them that worms were "friendly," but they had absolutely no interest in holding onto the slippery little guys. And the idea of stabbing their new friends to death with a hook was even less appealing, especially over breakfast. I switched them to the default bait, canned yellow corn. We gathered our stuff and headed down the path toward the creek. We"d covered less than twenty yards when I heard a scream behind me.

　　"Daddeeeeee!"

　　I whirled and saw Anders, wide-eyed, frozen in place. He was pointing, like a miniature grim reaper, at a fallen tree beside the path.

　　"Don"t move," I said.

　　As calmly as I could, I walked back to him, fully expecting a water moccasin or a swarm of hornets. I followed Anders"s stare down the log until my eyes finally rested on the object of his terror; a millipede was inching its way along the tree trunk. To a child who"d never encountered anything more menacing than a cockroach, it must have looked like some horrible interplanetary creature waiting to pounce with all thousand legs on the next small boy who wandered by.

　　"It"s just a millipede," I said. "It won"t bite."

　　I leaned down and touched its back to show him, then turned to tell Graham to come over and look. He was already on his way, brandishing a large stone. For some reason, the compassion he felt for earthworms was totally lost on invertebrates with legs.

　　"Let"s kill it," he said.

　　"Leave it be," I said. "Let"s go catch some trout."

　　Unfortunately, while searching for his antimillipede missile, Graham had left his rod and reel in the woods. I had the boys stay on the path while I kicked through piles of leaves and brambles. In the few minutes it took to locate and extract the rod from a bed of poison ivy, the sky darkened considerably. Then it started to rain. Hard. And with that, our planned assault on the trout population of the creek turned into a full-scale amphibious retreat back to the car.