The Frog Rebellion
The rebellion was led by college students, I think. That's just a guess.
I first encountered the frogs along a strip of forest that ran alongside a stream in the park next to my home. The water came from springs and drainage pipes farther north. It burbled southwards to a tiny, concrete bridge, just twenty feet long and six feet high. Of course, eventually the stream ran under the bridge, through the woods, and emptied into Paint Branch Creek. But it was a long and marshy hike to where the waters joined.
There had always been turtles along the stream. They liked the mixture of shade and sun. They probably enjoyed the shelter of trees and rocky ground, too, with plenty of hiding places. My friend Joe found more than I did. He usually found more of any reptile. I searched, but not in a focused way. I wandered through the stream beds, hunting and hoping for curiosities. I uncovered occasional turtles, snakes, tadpoles, frogs, and minnows. One day, I ventured into the shaded waters with my younger brother. He turned around a corner in a forest trail and sprinted back to me, alarmed.
"There's a monster frog," he huffed.
"Is it a frog or a toad?" I wasn't bothered. He should have known not to get too excited about either one.
"I don't know. It's big." He moved his hands to almost a shoulder width apart. Even at his size, a few years younger than me, he was describing ridiculous dimensions for a frog. "Really big."
"Right." I hopped up out of the stream and marched up the trail.
Part of me expected to find nothing at all. My brother had probably seen a sort-of-large toad that moved into the underbrush as soon as he turned his back. On the other side of the tree, though, I found a thing. It hadn't moved. Maybe it felt no need to move, ever. It was larger than a box turtle. It was larger than most of the slabs of shale rock.
I took a step back. It was so large, I didn't want to get close. It couldn't be natural, here.
Whatever it was, it did look like a frog. But instead of being the size of my fist, it was at least eight to ten inches long. It was almost as fat, too, seven inches at the widest part of its belly. Instead of being forest colored, this creature was brownish-green with a pale, mottled, grey-tan underbelly.
"Wow," I breathed, after a few seconds had passed and I'd caught my breath enough to speak.
"See?" My little brother hovered behind me. He wanted to make sure the animal got me first, if it attacked. He put his left hand on my right shoulder.
"Huh." My gaze narrowed. This creature hadn't moved while I'd been watching it.
Maybe it was a rubber model. Maybe it was real, but dead. I had to find out. I wasn't putting my fingers near it, though. There were such things as poison frogs, after all. Instead, I shook off my brother's hand. Then I searched around and got a stick.
"Don't leave!" my brother hissed. I knew what he meant. This thing looked weird and out of place. He didn't want to stand too close to it. And he especially didn't want me to run off and ditch him.
"It's okay." I broke the stick to make it into the right length. Then I crept forward. "I just want to see if it's real."
"Don't do it!" My brother clenched his fists. He crouched to flee, as if he thought I could set off the animal like a bomb. Maybe he was right, but it sure didn't seem to move much.
I poked the frog. The frog blinked. It breathed rapidly, as if alarmed while being half-paralyzed. I saw its throat vibrate. It took one step. After a moment, it took another. Then it settled on its haunches. As far as the frog was concerned, it had moved far enough.
"It's alive." Okay. Now I had to think.
On the way in, I had noticed clutches of frog eggs in the water. They had looked like translucent grapes with black dots in the middle. Some of the eggs had been normal sized. Some had seemed oddly large, though.
We had gotten rain a few days ago. The water level had risen in the stream. The level had receded since, which resulted in tide pools next to the banks of the stream. Most of those stagnant pools had eggs in them. In total, our stream had accumulated hundreds of eggs, at least. And I thought only some of the eggs were normal. A few clutches were huge, several times the size of eggs that our local frogs produced.
"Let's go get Joe," I suggested. I knew my best friend in the neighborhood would want to see. Besides, Joe was two years older than me and his dad was some kind of bug-collecting scientist. Frogs weren't too different. At least, they ate bugs.
When we returned with Joe - prying him away from his family at their table took effort, although we were greatly aided by our breathless urgency in summoning him to see the giants - he was awed, at first. He quickly grew bewildered, as I'd expected, but the sight of the eggs also led him to a leap of logic.
"There have to be others," he said, staring at a clutch of frog jellies bigger than two of his fists together. "Let's find them."
The chore ended up being easy. There weren't many places for the frogs to hide. We found one on the trail, plainly visible, and it walked under a bush only when we shouted and ran up to it. Another, we found under a large fern on the banks of the stream. Soon, we located another. And another.
"At least five," Joe said.
"Are they weird?"
"This is really cool," he breathed. For a second, he tensed, as if he were on the verge of peeing himself. "Really, really."
The giants seemed oddly unafraid of us. We dashed from place to place, studying them, although no individual frog seemed to be doing much of anything interesting or, indeed, much of anything at all. Eventually, we got bored and went to play games on the ball fields in the park. But we vowed to return. Joe mumbled he wanted to take eggs to grow in an aquarium.
Later in the week, after Joe talked with his father, he concluded these were most likely specimens of American Bullfrog. They were too big to be anything else.
"Someone captured them for dissection, my father says." Joe shook his head at the craziness. "But I guess students set them free. Probably at the university."
A few weeks later, I wandered along the stream and noticed it was full of tadpoles. Nearly all the deep puddles on each bank had filled up with wriggling green-black creatures with thick bodies and eel-like tails. I reached in and picked up a mid-sized individual. It wriggled frantically in my fist, so I put it down. I crouched to study a group of them in their home.
Usually, I could hold tadpoles by making a cup of water in my hands. The tadpoles would swim around in the water for a while as I got my up-close look. These specimens, though, were a bit large for that. Some of them were already longer than my fingers. A few of them would have filled my cupped hands entirely, leaving almost no room for water.
I thought about all the frogs we were about to see.
In another week, I headed into the woods around the stream for an inspection. Sun poked through the boughs above me. Mostly in the shade but in a sunny spot, too, I found a half-dozen sizable frogs, for sure younger than their bigger mothers and fathers. Some of the frogs still had their tadpole tails. They were already bigger than our normal frogs, though. And they were growing pretty fast.
When I mentioned it to Joe, he didn't seem as excited.
"They don't really belong here." He shrugged. "That's what my dad says."
A few days later, I walked through and saw even more frogs. There were almost no tadpoles left anywhere. A while after, though, my younger brother and I hiked in another check-up. This time, we found a bunch of dead frogs. Some of them were lying on their backs. At first, I thought they were pretending.
"What happened?" asked my brother in a hushed tone.
"I don't know." I picked up a stick from the trail. With it, I poked one of the frogs lying on its back.
"Don't do that," said my brother.
There was no sign of an injury. There was no obvious killer. The first body seemed stiff. The next, which I found under a bramble beside a tree, felt mushy through the poke of the stick. Whether that meant it had just died recently or had died before the others, I didn't know.
My brother and I hiked fifty yards downstream. We saw a few live frogs, big ones, but they hopped away from us. That was good. Most of the other frogs, though, were just dead bodies.
A rainstorm swept through the next day. It was three more days before the ground got firm enough for us to hike back along the path of the stream.
"Now everything is dead," my brother murmured.
"Yeah." This time, there was a deceased box turtle among the reptile corpses. We saw dead toads, which looked awfully small and warty. We saw minnows that had gone belly up. We found a drowned mouse, too, or at least something soft, furry, and washed up against a fallen tree branch. Finally, on the east side of the trail, I stumbled upon a larger, older box turtle that was still walking. It looked sick.
The turtle's shell and even its limbs seemed speckled by pale spots. I felt amazed and impressed by its hardiness inasmuch as it had survived a severe devastation, at least so far.
"A storm never killed everything before," I said to my brother. I was trying to think of why this one had been different.
"I've never seen so many animals dead." His eyes were wide. He looked to me for answers but I felt as bewildered as he was.
We never heard a good explanation, although my parents suggested pollution. It's a possible reason. At this distance in time, there's no way for me to know for sure what killed those frogs. The foremost possibilities:
a) The park service found out and set poison to prevent the transplanted frogs from taking overb) A factory upstream dumped something. In that case, the water was always going to kill the animals downstream and it got especially bad when swollen flood waters carried even more pollution to themc) A disease, possibly borne by the transplanted frogs, infected most of the reptilesd) Our local park animals ate insects poisoned by insecticide
Whatever ended it, the frog rebellion lasted only for a spring and a summer. And it was probably started by college students.
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