Head lice are wondrous beasts. Consider their claws: perfectly formed for clutching hair and swinging slim louse bodies from strand to shining strand. Consider their keen sense of smell, temperature, gravity and more: Not for them Rover's hide, nor Kittycakes' pelt, nor other hairy spots upon the human host. Put a louse on a person and it creeps its way up till it reaches that forested pinnacle and sinks its fangs, if not a flag, into the fleshy floor.

Some people are drawn to lice. Scientists seek them out, teasing through fur and feathers of everything from mammals in Missouri to ospreys in Ontario and diligently cataloging every little beastie they find. They've even ventured into jails to harvest lice off people's heads so they can study fine points of louse ecology.

And who among us would not be touched by that beautiful Dutch painting, "A Mother's Duty," of a kneeling child, head in mommy's lap, getting deloused?

Any parent whose kid has had head lice, that's who.

Every year, an estimated 6 million American kids will get infested with these wingless, six-legged crawlers, kids more often than grown-ups, girls more often than boys, Caucasians more often than African Americans. Louse infestations are probably the No. 1 reason for school absences, says Karen Maiorca, director of district nursing services for the Los Angeles Unified School District. But the district doesn't record the precise number of infestations. Lice, health-wise, are small fry.

"Nobody dies from head lice," or even gets sick from them, says Suzanne Rue, LAUSD's communicable disease resource nurse. Not that Rue considers them any kind of picnic--"Oh, please" were the first words she uttered when the "L" word came up. But she and her colleagues save their case-tracking efforts for serious stuff like meningitis, scarlet fever and tuberculosis.

Head lice are simply a gross but harmless occupational hazard of being a kid--of clumping together in giggling, hair-braiding gaggles, of romping in a heap in the schoolyard, of pressing close to whisper secrets or snuggling, three heads to a pillow, at a sleepover. The cunning louse spreads and thrives via some of the loveliest cameos of childhood.

Which doesn't make parents hate them any less. Lice, after all, too often mean that dreaded call from school with instructions to drop all, pick up Johnny or Janie, and spend hours applying insecticide, washing brushes and bedding, and dragging a comb through snarly locks.