It wasn’t Aunt Ruth’s homemade chocolate or butterscotch fudge I remembered most from visiting her each summer.  The white-haired lady lived in a two-story ranch house at the foot of the Rincon Mountains.  She wasn’t technically our aunt but was much older than Mom and had been Mom’s friend since her childhood, so Mom always called her Aunt Ruth.  This would have made her our Great-Aunt Ruth, but we didn’t worry about formalities.

      Aunt Ruth let my older brother Aaron and me use her water hoses behind her house because it was always hot under the Arizona summer sun among the prickly pear, cholla, and saguaro cacti.  We made rivulets between sophisticated earthen dams of our design.  Enough mud made up for whatever the sun bore down upon us.  We played until we were so dirty that we could taste grit and feel dirt with our tongue along the front of our teeth.

      In the late afternoons, there were bats.  Mom told us they were dangerous.  One time, we found a decayed, dead bat in the mud.

      When my older brother turned sixteen, he developed other interests besides water management.  This prompted me to shift my attention to the mountains behind Aunt Ruth’s house.  Their steep, rocky hillsides led me up between patches of dried, scratchy bushes.

      One afternoon, I stumbled upon a cool, small spring where water oozed from the ground amidst the dry, gritty rubble.  I told Aunt Ruth about my discovery.

      She rubbed her chin, saying, “I don’t know of any springs around here.”

      The following year, the spring had dried up.

      The year after, the spring had reappeared, providing more water than before.  By then, I had learned that springs were fed from underground passages at higher elevations.  It became my quest to locate that body of water, even though the mountains behind Aunt Ruth’s house were too large and hot to scale in one afternoon.

      On one of our visits, just before sunset, I saw two bats flying out from between two closely placed boulders up the mountainside from my mysterious spring.  I had never known where the bats around Aunt Ruth’s house came from, so I made my way up the hillside.  Between the large rocks was an opening no bigger than my palm.

      Bats were supposed to live in caves, not in holes in the ground.  I found a pebble and dropped it into the hole, but didn’t hear it hit bottom.  This presented me with a new quest.  I ran down to Aunt Ruth’s ranch house, wiped my shoes on her back door mat, and interrupted whatever discussion everyone else was having in the living room, taking care not to step out of the kitchen and onto her tan carpet.

      “May I borrow some string?”  I had to ask calmly so Mom wouldn’t question why I wanted it.  She would have kept me inside if I told her about the bats.

      “In the kitchen on the right side, the second drawer down,” Aunt Ruth said.

      “Now, honey,” Mom said to me.  “What are you working on?”

      “I need to measure something.”  I smiled, but only a little.

      My older brother Aaron, sitting on the couch, almost looked interested.

      “We’ll be leaving in a few minutes,” Mom said with her hands on her lap, “so don’t get too involved in something.”

      I paused long enough to show appreciation before grabbing the string from the kitchen drawer and hurrying back up the mountainside.  By the time I found a rock that could serve as a weight, I heard Aaron come up behind me.

      “Tie this to the end of this string,” I said.

      “Why?”  He looked down at the rock in my hand.

      “Because bats came from this hole.”

      “Bats live in caves,” he said plainly.  But he tied the string around the rock.  “What’s down there?”

      “I don’t know,” I said.  “That’s what we’re going to find out.”

      By then, the sun had set, and it was growing dark.  Aaron lowered the rock into the hole with the string.

      “Don’t drop it,” I said.

      “I’m not stupid,” Aaron said in his irritated voice.  “And don’t be afraid of bats.”

      Cats and dogs bite, but that was okay because they’re friendly.  But when bats bit people, they intended to cause injury.

      Aaron held the spool loosely, allowing the string to unroll freely into the hole from the rock's weight.  After this continued for some time, Aaron looked up at me and said, “How deep is it?”

      Mom yelled from the ranch house, “Tyler, Aaron, it’s time to go.”

      The spool finally went slack.

      “Hurry,” I said.

      Aaron made a knot in the string.  “This will tell us where it stopped,” he said, winding the string back onto the spool as he pulled it out of the hole.

      “What do you think is down there?” I asked him.

      “Something big enough for bats,” his voice was hurried as he wound up the string.

      “Tyler, Aaron!” we heard from the ranch house.

      Up came the rock from the hole.

      “Got it,” Aaron said, gripping it.  “It’s slimy,” he said as we rushed down the hillside.