The Frogs

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The Frogs

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We walked along a stream, the grasses short, almost silver, interspersed with red-leafed huckleberry and the tall, puffed heads of pasque flowers. Beyond the rush of the stream there was the drone of insects–bees, or mosquitos, somewhere far-off but omnipresent, in our chests like the thump of a bass.

Suddenly the ground began to move, and it took us a moment to realize that it was a swarm of frogs as small as my fingertip. With each step we took, the frogs leapt out of the way, hundreds of them fleeing the soles of our boots, and all of us dancing carefully so as not to step on them.

All the while, the wind was blowing low and quiet, stirring the grasses so they bent the way the stream was moving, a ripple of water and grass and sunlight, and the grey point of Mt. Jefferson turning purple in the leaning light, the first dampenings of dusk, the half moon imprinted, pale, behind the sunlight, and that alpine smell, rock and spruce and old fire smoke. It was all of us then, us and the frogs, crouched down in grass, waiting for the last blinks of blue shadow.

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I’m the author of four environmental and science fiction novels: Call of the Sun Child, Listen, The Seas of Distant Stars, and Blue Mar.

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