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THE SECRET PLACE OF TWO BOYS. 15 April 2009
Canyon 26 February 2009
Bled Dry 18 February 2009
| Imperfect Reflections: The Bullfrog |
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| Stories |
| Written by Connor Delaney Rickett |
| Saturday, 14 February 2009 01:13 |
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Continued From: Shadow Dancer The Bullfrog
I was on a golf course, in a small, seemingly random piece of mock-wilderness that nature has claimed for its own. There was a willow there, which bent far over the creek. They have since cut it down, leaving a stump sprouting a few stubborn limbs, but at the time it was still healthy and strong. I had seen it from a distance, proudly waving the graceful limbs of its kind in a spring breeze so I had climbed it to look down. The critters of the creek were scarcely aware of my existence, with the exception of a falcon of some sort, who had flown off to a distant light pole when I climbed the tree. I could see a muskrat gathering water weeds for his burrow, fish and crawdads battling over bits of edible goodies, and so on. It was almost sunset, and still getting cool at nights. I was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, and the mosquitoes had found me, so I was about to leave when something caught my attention. A magnificent bullfrog, a real giant, swam out of a hole in the bank. He promptly plopped his bulk on the bank, and began to croak. He was, I imagined, seeking the attention of the lady bullfrogs, and had risen early in order to seek it. As it turned out, he had gotten more attention that he wanted, and I stopped to watch for a moment. In fact, he had gotten more attention than even I knew of, but I will get to that later. Now, I can’t know what the life of this frog had been like, up until our chance meeting, but I’m going to allow myself to describe it as might have been. The beginning I can be sure of; a tadpole wriggles out of the gelatinous coating of his egg. One among thousands. From there, it becomes more conjecture. He is a bullfrog tadpole, so he is born high up on the food chain, compared to most tadpoles. Still he has to avoid the attentions of the giant water-beetles who zip around the creek and its ponds like aquatic tanks. One races through the swarm of his brothers and sisters, and heads straight for him. He puts on a burst of speed, and the beetle grabs the tadpole beside him instead. Then the largest of the nightmarish dragonfly larvae, tired of eating mosquito larvae, rise up like the dragons of fantasy, and begin their feast. Our tadpole finds a tangle of weeds, and saves himself. Many of the tadpoles die in the first few minutes, and the vast majority of them have died by the end of the first week. By the time two weeks are up, our tadpole is too big to worry about dragonfly larvae, and fast enough to avoid the terrible water-beetles. He grows large on a diet of mosquito larvae, other tadpoles, and anything else he can find. He is faster than the rest, and more energetic; he comes out first, gets his pick of the best food, and uses his abundant energy to avoid the fish and crawdads. Time passes, and the tadpole begins a slow change. He develops tiny legs, that grow, and as they grow, they slow him down. His tail begins to shrink, as his front legs appear. All these things make it harder to move fast, harder to hide, harder to survive. The murky water becomes hard for him to breath, until one day he can breath it no longer, and nearly drowns. Luckily, his instincts drive him to the surface to breathe, for the first time, the cold, clear, air above. For three years these changes slowly take place as he grows. Then, one fine summer evening something unexplainable pulls him to the bank, and he walks out of the water onto the clinging mud, a modern reenactment of a common ancestor’s great first step onto a barren shore. On the land he finds many new dangers, and new enemies, yet he once more beats the odds, and survives. For two more years he grows more, and more, until he is a giant even among bullfrogs. Then, on a spring afternoon, with the sun sinking behind the Western peaks, another urge pulls at his uncomprehending mind. He comes out onto the shore, and casts aside years of instincts to hide from the world. He is one among thousands and thousands; a great survivor. Not just any survivor, but the biggest and strongest of the survivors. Instead of cowering under roots, or in a hole, he stands with a heroic pose, or as close as a frog can come to such, on the bare bank. He breaths deeply, filling his whole chest with air, and lets his voice ring out, echoing defiance and elation into the approaching night. That’s about where I came in, and I sat on the willow, looking down at his macho antics. Perhaps he had already bred, and some of his tadpoles already fought for their own survival in the creek below. Perhaps it was the first time his hoarse croak had ever resounded in the fading light. It was his last, for even as I watched him, in all his amphibious glory, so did another. The falcon swooped past me, and the bullfrog, encumbered by the next throat-swelling breath of air, had no chance to escape. The falcon plucked him from the bank, laboriously tried to haul him into the air, but fell back down. The bullfrog and the falcon struggled for a minute or two, and then the frog made a leap into the water, and the falcon flew off in frustration. I noticed that his patterning was that of juvenile. I suppose he was new to hunting on his own, and had overestimated himself. I noticed, also, that he had done his work, and the giant bullfrog’s dying body was floating among the weeds. He was idly trying to fight off the same fish and water-beetles he had avoided as a tadpole, and eaten as an adult. Soon he stopped struggling, and so the fish received the meal they had long been denied. The great survivor had become food for them in the end; all those years of fighting for survival adding up to nothing. People may be products of nature, but we cannot give in to our nature. It is the things that aren’t reflected in any kind of mirror which make us unique. We are like falcons, perhaps, as hunters and killers, but we are also very different in that we can put ourselves in the place of the frog. One thing nature can teach us above all else is that all the best things in humanity; understanding, awareness of beauty, mercy, and love, begin with the one thing that nature most clearly lacks. That something is, of course, empathy. We are, by our very awareness of living, and by the questioning which comes from that awareness, obligated to whenever possible rise above our own nature. We alone can change the patterns of this great web we’re so intricately woven into, and so we must labor to use that gift in the best of ways. Feel for those people and things around you, for whether they are friend or foe, aiding or opposing, it only the strength of you and them combined which holds you both together. |
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