Tick Season: My war with the wildlife continues

I never thought I’d say this, but I miss the leeches. Now that the monsoons have passed, the weather has dried out, and a new pest is ruining my walks around the farm. Unlike leeches, however, these menaces attack without notice, only inflicting real pain approximately twelve hours later.
I liked the leeches because they’re so blatant, like a tank rolling through your village. With a little practice, you can feel their cold, slimy approach on your feet and become an expert at flicking them away before they do any real harm. If they do bite, you get an unreasonable amount of blood that is sure to elicit sympathy from anyone with you. Within a few days, the wound simply heals over with a bit of itching.
Ticks are like secret agents. They’re the jungle’s contract killers, moving without detection. You can happily frolic in the grass without consequence for hours, and only know you’ve been attacked when you find the red bumps on your stomach and thighs (for some reason, this area of the body is like veal to a tick). Even then, it’s easy to mistake the bite for that of the mosquito (nighttime air raiders). Only when you spot the pinprick-sized culprit just under your skin do you know you’ve been hit, and then there’s nothing you can do but claw at it like a junkie and wait for the itch to start.
A quick Wikipedia search proves my position: “According to Pliny the Elder, ticks are ‘the foulest and nastiest creatures that be.’” Although, like the other creatures that attack in the jungle, all they want is a little blood, some ticks can hang around for days on your skin, happily growing fat. Some people have allergic reactions and form welts around a bite. Luckily I just have the normal reaction of intense itching that lasts weeks.
I miss the leeches. They have personality, inching along frantically, feeling blindly with their little heads for a warm place to attach. When they do manage to bite and fill up with blood, they drop off after about twenty minutes. Then they’re even more comical, barely able to move, engorged and happy. Jungle kids play with them like other kids play with earthworms. And of course there are the medicinal applications; medieval as they may be, ticks have no such usefulness.
Ticks are just hateful. And there’s no time when this fact becomes more apparent than at three in the morning when the itch comes. You wake up scratching, and continue until your now fully-alert brain says it’s probably best to stop, although the bites demand otherwise. So you quit, throwing your hands above the covers, telling yourself it will pass.
It doesn’t pass. The itching turns to burning. The ticks demand your attention. And so you give it to them, turning on the light, removing all your clothes, and slowly picking at each bite until the culprit is gone. By then, you’re wide awake and angry as heck, without a leech to burn or a mosquito to satisfyingly squash against the wall.
I now declare jihad on ticks.