Many Augusts, singing loud, have passed me by without my giving them a shred of attention. What made the sound? The air, or the trees, the month itself, embodied in unknown voices? I don’t think I knew much more than that, although I suppose I was aware of what a cricket sounded like. Perhaps it is time to find out more. I know now, as I did then, that at night when the air is soft and cool, a multitude of separate actions having died down, and when the earth is relieved of a fire taken to the stars, a plainsong goes up and the night takes substance in pulsing sound. When I listen, I see that in detail the sounding of an August night is not melodious. It is full of clicks, dry rasps, ratchets, reedy, resinous scrapings, and except for countless populations playing on one string, disassociated. There is only one phrase for each species of insect. The over-all sound is occasionally reminiscent of telegraph wires, mechanically shrill and tense; but in the context of the night, speckled with stars, it becomes as wide, warm, and luminous as any symphony. Having heard of using a flashlight to search for these musicians, I go out, sometime after eight-thirty, and start training it on sounds, with complete lack of success at first. Either the sound stops, or the animal that makes it is invisible to me. A bat flies overhead, chasing insects. It is known for accuracy, having ears with a receptiveness like radar, tuned to the finest measurements of space, but its flight seems frantic. It beats back and forth, around, over and under. Suddenly it is very close, perhaps a few inches over my head. I duck at the leathery, fluttering sound, something like the rippling folds of a taut chute, despite my knowing that only in lingering myth and hearsay do bats catch in human hair. Then it is off again, with its violent, erratic flight. The darkness takes deeper hold. It is full of the loud throbbing, the insistently high-pitched rasping of the insects, with an occasional tree frog sounding a contrapuntal “Ek-ek.” Playing my flashlight under the trees shows up a spider web in beautiful detail. The silk strands are clear against the black night, their swoops and whorls all held together by long perfected execution, with the tiny engineer way up on his round span, his semblance of the globe in its vast waters. In high suspension, in the larger silences of the sky, all rings well in consonance, and the pulse of living instruments is with the massed stars that run out and dive away above all heads, and with the ground, my heart and ear, my blood and bone. A persistent light racheting makes me concentrate on one bush, where I eventually find a green, well-camouflaged, long-horned grasshopper with orange eyes--a male, since it has no ovipositor on its abdomen. The females are silent, with the honored role of being courted and invited.