They are also aided by their subtle, anesthetic touch, as vouched for by the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, who spent formative stretches of her early years in the wilderness of northern Quebec and northern Ontario, where her entomologist father was posted: “In the woods, you wore pants not because it was butch but because if you didn’t wear pants and tuck [them] into your socks you would get blackflies up your legs. They make little holes in you, into which they inject an anticoagulant. You don’t feel them when they are doing it, and then you take your clothes off and find out you are
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