Blue Highways: A Journey into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

While I stood, an uncommon amount of noise came invisibly through the brush. Whatever it was, I felt vulnerable and tried to hurry. The moonlight wasn’t much, but what I could make out looked like a tiptoeing army helmet. I was moving backwards when I realized it was an armadillo. I stopped, it waddled on, sniffed me out at the last moment, and shifted direction without hurry. The conquistadors named the armadillo (“little armored one”), but Texans call them “diggers” because of the animal’s penchant for scratching up larvae and worms, especially from soft soil of new graves. In spite of both the belief that armadillos feed on corpses and the animal’s susceptibility to leprosy, poor whites ate them with greens and cornbread during the Depression and called them “Hoover hogs” or “Texas turkeys” (on the Christmas table); even now, poor blacks, calling them just “dillas,” barbecue the soft meat. Ancient Mayas refused to eat them because they believed the carrion vulture did not die but rather shed wings and metamorphosed into an armadillo. But now, for a creature hardly changed from its Cenozoic ancestors, things are a little better. Texas law protects it from commercial exploitation, and that means it’s harder today to buy a lamp or purse made from an armadillo carapace. When I got back to my rig, the critter was nosing along the highway, looking for bugs popped by cars—that’s why in the warm season so many armadillos get pressed like fossils into the soft asphalt.