Frog Hunt

When we were six years old, my brother and I were expert frog-hunters.  (I'd like to take credit for our success, but my brother was really the skilled huntsman, with a quick eye and quicker hands.)  There was a pond around the corner--past the scary lady's house and beyond the zip-line for the older neighborhood kids--which was a frog's paradise.  In my mind's eye, I see the two of us clambering across sodden logs slippery with bright green algae, trying to just once follow my mother's admonition to "stay dry."

We hunted for the sport of it, scouring the murky surface for flashes of gold-flecked eyes or the long fluid leg strokes of our prey.  Over the course of the hunting season we would catch everything from tadpoles and pollywogs all the way up to the bullfrogs: the whole gamut of amphibious maturation.  But inevitably when we staggered home--sneakers sloshing with pond water, faces smeared with viscous mud--we were empty-handed.  For what, after all, is the good of a frog in a bathtub?