the brown spots covering its dark green back. I handed the frog to Jacob when we arrived at our campsite. Anjela’s face distorted as if she found the frog repulsive. I knew that, in actuality, it disturbed her for another reason. She had previously told me that she raised a group of tadpoles as a child and accidentally killed them. At the time, she was unaware that tadpoles lost the ability to breathe water once they grew into frogs. One day, she had opened her frog bucket to find her pets dead, floating, and blue from suffocation. Skylar, Jacob’s pit bull, came running up and sniffed at the frog in Jacob’s hand. “You wanna play with the frog, Skylar?” Jacob asked. Skylar whined. Jacob dropped the frog, and Skylar bolted into action. Clearly terrified of its canine pursuer, the frog hopped around as if the sand was a bed of hot coals. We assumed that the frog would make it to the water before Skylar could catch it, but the game went on for several minutes as the frog repeatedly doubled back to avoid Skylar’s gnashing maw. Eventually, the frog grew tired. Skylar caught it, and her instincts brought the game to a grisly end. As Skylar lifted the frog in her mouth, she thrashed her head from side-to-side. There was a loud popping sound as her teeth pierced the frog’s body. Noticing that something was wrong with her toy, Skylar dropped the frog to the ground. She stared at its motionless body and started to whine again. Jacob had somehow disappeared, but one of his friends tossed the frog into the bushes. Skylar charged after it. She then spent the next half an hour barking and whining, trying to get the frog to start hopping again. The night wore on and a cacophony of mooing erupted from the water. The bullfrogs had awoken. It never occurred to me before that bullfrogs could have earned their namesake from this distinctly bovine call. The mooing goaded us back into our hunt. I watched Jacob walk along the shoreline, slowly but not too closely, yet I still couldn’t tell how he located the frogs. Finally, I had the novel idea of asking. “The frog’s eyes glow when you shine light in ’em,” Jacob said, “It hypnotizes them, and if you keep it focused right on their eyes, you can just walk up and grab ’em.” With this knowledge at my disposal, I set off on my own, for reasons I didn’t entirely understand. Perhaps, deep down, I wanted to prove myself a capable hunter to the group. Over the next several hours, I came close to catching a frog on a dozen occasions. Jacob failed to mention how slippery they were and that touching them broke the hypnotic effect. On the Manastash 2013
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