Unable to drive all the way into my cabin due to heavy patchwork accumulations of snow, I hiked the last hundred yards. Once inside the cabin, I started a fire in the woodstove and sat alongside it, allowing the heat to press its warm nose against me.
Sitting all alone beside the
woodstove got me to thinking. I first
thought about the lodgepole pines around my cabin. Not much in this world grows so skinny and
tall and straight all at once. They are
exceedingly useful in that. They make
perfect poles. I mean, hello, they are
named lodgepole pines.
And then I got to thinking
about legs—more specifically, the number of legs critters have.
Having two legs, as opposed to
one, makes pretty good sense in matters of mobility and balance. Four legs strike a nice balance. Six or eight legs is a little freaky, but I
see that working.
But what about centipedes and
millipedes? They seem downright piggish
in the leg department. According to Orkin, a
company famous for killing centipedes, a
centipede will have 15 to 177 pairs of legs; dependent on the kind of
centipede.
While centipedes are blessed
one pair of legs per body segment, millipedes sport two pairs per segment. Most species of millipede will have 300 legs. But there is one type of millipede, named Illacme
plenipes, that tallies a total leg-count of 750.
That’s a lot of legs.
Finally, I am a little baffled
by one thing. Why don’t we have a bunch
of three-legged bugs or animals? Three
is good number. A three--legged stool is
as stable as four-legged one. A
tricycle is plenty stable and maneuverable.
—Mitchell Hegman
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