Two years ago destiny had an amphibious hand in my decision to adopt a trio of small African Dwarf water frogs. You know the saying about how the best things come in small packages--well this Christmas present became an instant source of entertainment.
It became very obvious to me early on that the frogs, whom I named Clarence, Harold, and Maude (after the unique 70s comedy) were not the brightest tadpoles in the pond. While they were fun to feed and fascinating to watch, they had a bizarre habit of launching themselves at their food pellets several times and missing their targets entirely, swallowing water or gravel or occasionally each other while the pellets bobbed happily untouched. When they actually managed to accidentally get food in their tiny mouths, they would immediately spit it out, then re-swallow it, and then repeat the process. It was a wonder to me that they matured to frog-hood at all, and a miracle when their tiny frog bellies began to swell over time into healthy tiny pot bellies. It took several months before I realized that along with their lack of frog marbles and gracefulness, the frogs also happened to be blessed with the ability to escape.
While it's pretty impossible to know for sure which frog was which, the one I believe to be Harold escaped early in their first year and proved to me that lurking behind those tiny beady eyes wheels were turning. He flung himself from my hands one day when I was scooping him out to clean the frog-tank, hitting the ground hopping he headed in a straight bee-line for the door. The thing about frogs is that they happen to be very slippery, particularly when the person holding them has soap on their hands, and he managed to get halfway down the hall before I got a good grip on him, the eyes of my amused hall-mates watching the whole show.
The frog I thought was Clarence got picked on by the others as he matured, and it wasn't long before he stopped eating entirely and had to take the porcelain express to frog heaven. Another year passed without too much excitement, and I settled back into my comfortable assumptions that my two frogs were nothing more or less than adorable little morons.
One day I noted that Harold had stopped eating. At least, I think it was Harold. Maude had grown rather fat at this point, and had slightly better aim when it came to feeding. It only took him half a dozen tries to catch a pellet, where it took Harold several dozen. In an attempt to give poor Harold a fighting chance I separated the two, putting Maude in a Tupperware container on my desk for the night. It occurred to me that Maude may actually jump out, so I loosely taped a piece of printer paper to the top of the Tupperware as a make-shift lid.
The next morning I knew something was wrong. There wasn't enough movement in the water. I peered down into the tank and saw Harold happily swimming away, but the Tupperware was empty. I stared for several seconds at the water, looking at it from every angle in hopes that Maude was simply hiding or had learned to be invisible. But there was still no frog. In a rising panic, I searched the desk-top but found nothing. No spilled water, no frog-sized puddles, not even a pebble of gravel. I began to search in earnest then, looking in and under everything that was frog level, combing my floor several times to no avail.
It occurred to me suddenly that my door had about an inch of space underneath it, a perfect frog-sized exit for a bite-sized desperado to crawl through. I felt a mixture of horror and, I'll admit, respect for the little monster. To have enough strength to propel himself out of the water, squeeze under the paper, fall off the desk (a fairly decent drop for an animal only a half-inch high) and be on the lamb in my hallway...it was obvious that Maude was on a mission. But to where?
I alerted my hall's RA to the situation and asked her to spread the word, and did the same in the boys' hall on the same floor. After asking the janitor to keep an eye out for Maude ("a WHAT?" she said, like she'd never heard of pocket-sized water frogs before) and being laughed out of the room I stopped asking people to aid in my search. Instead I made a "Missing" poster complete with a sketch of Maude and my name and phone number in case he was found. I was under no delusions at this point that Maude was still alive. Even if he had escaped moments before I woke up, unless he had found water and found it soon, he was a goner. And time had run out for my search.
I had to be on a bus heading home for the holidays soon, and after twenty more fruitless minutes of looking I left Caldwell, dark thoughts of a matchbox casket and tiny funeral services filling my mind. I had already imagined a thousand ill fates for Maude, and each one ended with a webbed pancake, dime-sized. Several days later I returned to college and found a note stapled underneath my "Missing" poster on the dormitory billboard: "Frog Found," it said, "ask Hillary."
I found Hillary and there learned of the last adventures of Maude. He had indeed escaped under my door and waddled into my next door neighbor's room, where he took refuge in her laundry basket. Not necessarily being used to watching out for miniature frogs in her clothing, my neighbor had dumped the load into the washer, where Maude had evidently had the ride of his little life. She found him an hour later after pulling everything out of the dryer, his crispy body mummified next to her socks.
Word spread like wildfire around the dorms until it became a common joke to warn people of frog attacks in the laundry room, and quite a few people came up to me to offer their condolences and to visit Harold, who seemed oblivious that his tank-mate had just kicked the bucket. After a few weeks of swimming solo he seemed to know that something was up, and with a broken heart he too--excuse the pun--croaked.
Now I suppose I should have grieved a little more for Maude who, true to the character for which he was named, longed for adventure beyond the confines of a small plastic box. But I can't begrudge him his last great escape; it's a story that might have been passed down from tadpole to tadpole for generations, (providing Maude had ever met a female,) and stands to me as a testament that he was smarter than I gave him credit for.
As Junior year looms I'm considering getting another pet...
...preferably one that's too big to fit in the laundry.
