The Wolf and the Frog

This doesn’t have anything to do with anything, but that last fable and the anime series I'm watching got me on a kick.  If you look carefully about the irrigation channels, you can at least see that it's set in modern Japan.

Just a simple story.  A little bit Aesop and Pom Poko.  Not sure if I hit the right tone or not.  Sorry for the tough vocabulary – force of habit.  Anyway, been thinking a bit about frogs.  I wrote it in about 20-30 minutes at Skylark in Sannomiya this evening.  Enjoy.



The Wolf and the Frog

There once was a frog who lived in a rice paddy.  He came from a rather average frog family with 532 siblings, and he was the 381st egg, making him something of a middle child.  His pond was comfortable and near some old growth woodland where he and his pond-mates liked to play among the fallen foliage. 

Things went on swimmingly for some time until a few men with machines came by and set up concrete trenches with vertical slits to sluice the water between the rice fields, replacing his old dirt ditches.  When they finished, they patted each other on the back and drove off.  Unfortunately, the gap in the irrigation channel was too large to leap across and those frogs caught on the other side were unable to join their friends in other paddies.

So it was that at the end of each day, when all the other frogs bellowed out to one another, the poor creature would saddle up to the concrete ledge and look off in the distance.  Perhaps he wondered if they even still remembered him.

One evening as the gloam of twilight settled over his pond, he squatted down in his usual spot to listen plaintively to the chirruping croaks all cascading on top of one another.  He did not even notice it when a wolf from up in the mountains came sniffing along the edge of the woodland to get a drink from the pond.

He spotted the frog at a glance and, creeping up on it from downwind, was about to snap up the plump fellow in one toothy bite when he noticed the rather sullen look on his face. 

The wolf coughed into his paw.  “Ahem.”

Still the frog did not seem to take much notice.  Instead it bellowed out a deep, guttural sigh.  “Wrruhh-kerrrooo....”

“Frog,” the wolf said.  “Are you sick?”

“Oh, don’t you hear them all?  I miss my friends and family so terribly.  But for this giant canyon...”

The wolf was eyeing the froggy’s fleshy thighs and licked his chomps.  “Your friends, you say?  I see...”

“Oh, what I would give to see them again… if only… Oh, Brother Wolf, do you not love running with your pack more than anything?”

“The truth is, my kind are not so many these days.”

“And don’t you feel a certain something when you hear a howl from faraway?”

The wolf yawned.  His ears perched this way and that as if the wind whispered something from behind.  “Well, maybe a little hungry,” he admitted.

The frog gave a jerky start.  “Oh my, oh my!  I just had an idea, a revelation!  Brother Wolf, would you, could you find it in your heart to carry me across to see them?  I know you wish to eat me, and I can hardly argue the point, but–”

“Ride on my back?” the wolf exclaimed.  “Now, now, frog.  Aside from the law of creaturely camaraderie, I’m afraid we still have our dignity.”  He shook his head dismissively, “No, that is quite out of the question.”  His brow furrowed a little.  “But since you are not sick, I will tell you what I will do.  If you will hop into my mouth and not squirm around too much, I promise to carry you to the other pond to meet your friends.  But after that and you’ve had your fun, I will gobble you up in one toothy bite.”  He shrugged his shaggy mane.  “Nothing personal.”

The frog blinked his bulgy eyes and seemed to reason this out and bellowed in a loud agreement.

So, true to his word, the wolf brought the frog across the channel and gingerly lowered him into the neighboring pond.  All at once hundreds of plumb little froggies all set about leaping and laughing on top of each other with such frivolity that none of them seemed to notice the great hunter standing in their midst.

When the wolf saw how high the frog leaped with delight seeing his friends at long last and they at him, it reminded the wolf of a young pup many moons ago, gamboling around the den with the rest of the pack.

He set his ears to the wind.  A company of a thousand croakings.  He could not tell one from another.

After some time had passed and the moon had made its way quite high among the stars, the frog ambled over in front of him and said somewhat softly, but which a smile, “Okay, Mr. Wolf.  Thank you for your patience.  I’m ready.”

The wolf stood there with his keen eyes yellow in the darkness.  He looked this way and then that. 

“I only came for a drink of water,” he said, and trotted away into the wood.