All pictures by our daughter, Elizabeth
From my stories to my grandchildren...
Say Froggin Froggin Gear The Essentials That's Not a Frog Critters of the Night Guinea Pig Frog Toad Hunter The Horror Fry'em Up Snake Balls No Gig? No Worry What Do Frogs Eat?
While Danny (my 10-years older brother) and I spent the greater portion of our allotted outdoor time in the more traditional pursuits of hunting and fishing, on occasion we ventured out into what some might call the “bizarre.” Among these bizarre adventures were ginseng hunting, mushroom hunting, trapping, and frogging, to name but a few of the most popular. And the most popular of that group, story-wise, has to be frogging – say froggin'. Never, ever, ever pronounce the 'g' as in ing, unless you want to make a very strong point as in the following case.
I once lost a girlfriend because I chose to go froggin rather than on a date with her. Friday night – date night – was looming. Other couples had made plans to get together for a party. My girlfriend and I were included. Inquiring eyes turned to me. “No, I can’t go Friday night. I’m going froggin with Danny, “ I said honestly.
"What? You would rather go frogging than go on a date with me?!" She intentionally pronounced the ing, the equivalent of your mother yelling your full name, enunciating each syllable as if it stuck to her mouth when she had discovered some slight impropriety on your part.
"Well, yeah...." and I trailed off, trying to explain. But I am pretty sure she didn't hear much beyond that. As I saw it, I wasn't going to marry this girl and I had a limited amount of time that I could spend froggin’ with my brother. I chose my brother and a bunch of frogs. Suffice it to say that we didn't date anymore. Her choice, not mine. I guess I can’t blame her; she had lost to a bag full of frogs.
Girls are rather sensitive people, grandsons. Things you might think are non-issues, girls and women (to include grandmothers, mothers, sisters, and cousins) might think differently. Tread lightly; they are just flat-out hard to figure out sometimes.
I spent a lot of time with Danny in the early 1970’s. He was probably one of my best buddies. We disagreed on so many things, especially religion, but as long as we didn’t talk about those things, we really were the best of buds.
Froggin was not necessarily a technical sport. You didn’t need a dog, fancy shotgun, heavy briar-proof clothing, insulated boots, fishing rod – with a reel that actually worked – expensive lures or tackle box filled with every new fish-catchin’ contraption Field & Stream glorified in its pages. No, froggin was a sport that required little more than a long pole with a sharp gig attached to one end, a strong flashlight, and nerves of steel when a “thing” decided to swim around your legs or drop from a tree and slide down your back into your waders or cutoffs when you were chin deep in muck.
If we were to have made a list of froggin gear, which we never did, it would have looked something like this:
Now you might note that we borrowed a bunch of stuff from Uncle Jules. Uncle Jules, Aunt Jenny’s husband, was a good soul. In his younger days he did every possible outdoor thing that one could imagine, to include running ‘shine – something that Danny and I skipped. Over the years he collected a great deal of paraphernalia and, although he rarely did things like froggin in his later years, he still took pride in having a good selection of equipment, just in case he would take it up again someday or his boys would take interest. He often bought items such as gigs and hip waders just so his collection stayed in good order.
While our froggin list required considerable borrowing from Uncle Jules, it was not something we made a habit of; once we had borrowed an item, we sort of hung onto it. We figured we would just be going froggin again in a couple of weeks and felt it was a waste of natural energy to return the stuff and then have to drive back and get it a few days later. Usually, Jules would forget about the matter until he visited Danny and saw the gigs rusting in the corner of the garage or the waders drying and cracking in the back of Dan’s VW. He would grumble under his breath, but loud enough so I could hear and sometimes even take the bold step of collecting one or two of the items and cart them home with him, forcing us to make the trip to his house a few days later. He knew we would come borrowing and it was probably an exercise in futility, but I suspect he wanted us to pay at least a little homage to our benefactor. Still, he never refused us when we came scrounging back with our tails between our legs.
While the list of gear was short, most items on that list were essential, rather like a link in a chain – if you were out on the creek and it broke, unless you had a backup, you were done froggin for the night. As such, I think a little elaboration on our gear is appropriate. In priority order:
The Frog Gig
You may be pondering to yourself, “What could there possibly be to a froggin gig other than a couple of sharp prongs?” Well, you got it about right. Our best gigs were about ¾ the size of your hand with two or three very sharp barbed points, attached to a ten-foot-long bamboo pole. In most cases, if you didn’t have a gig then you weren’t gonna be doing much froggin. However, we did once find an exception to this rule while fishin’ in the middle of the night in a lake surrounded by huge bullfrogs and very few bass. We found that, in a pinch, a fish landing net can double quite nicely as a frog landing net. But in most cases, the gig was essential.
The Flashlight
The flashlight was right up there with the frog gig as far as importance, and actually the only piece of equipment that we could absolutely not be without. In reality, it should be first on the list, even above the frog gig, but I just don’t have the heart to do that, given that the sport often goes by the name, “frog giggin.”
A strong light was essential for two purposes. The first was that the beam, held directly in the frog’s eyes, kept it paralyzed so we could ease up and gig it. But more importantly, we had to see where we were going. Moonless nights with huge trees arching over a slow moving creek in the middle of nowhere, were nearly as dark as the depths of an unlit cave. If our lights went out miles from the car, we might be waiting there all night for the morning light.
Burlap Bag
The burlap bag was where we kept our frogs once we gigged them. It was long and brown – a 75-pound bag of horse feed had once resided in it. It was porous so water could get in on the frogs and keep them cool. It was easy to tie at the top and latch around a waist so it drug behind us in the water, freeing our hands for the more technical details of giggin. And yes, if you’re thinking it, in a pinch we did procure one of Mona’s nice clean pillowcases. And yes, Danny and Mona are still married – Mona is nothing less than a saint.
Gloves
The sole purpose of gloves was so your hands wouldn’t have to actually touch the frog when pulling it off the gig. Although we were quite willing to eat the beasts, we were unwilling to touch them with our unprotected hands in the field. Danny never worried about gloves because he somehow managed to never have to pull a frog off the gig. Over time, it became such a hassle to pull the soaking gloves onto my soaking hands that I just grabbed the frog and pulled it off. Danny was amazed at my manliness and lavished me with praise, “Wow! How can ya do that Rod? Ya sure are braver than me.”
Hip Waders
To me, hip and chest waders were similar to gloves – too much hassle to worry with. The intent was, of course, to keep the water out so you could get back in the car nice and dry. The problem was, it didn’t work. Frogs seemed to have a second sense when it came to positioning us just the way they wanted us. Invariably, they would sit on the other side of the creek from us so that the depth of the water just edged above the height of the boot. Noticing this, the gigger would lean towards the giggee with the gig extended – two feet too short. Ease into the depths a bit more – one foot to go. Lean just a bit more and then a trickle of water hit your foot, you jerked, stumbled and the entire creek rushed into your boots. The frog, having seen enough, laughed and bounced away. To me, waders weren’t worth the fuss and I tossed them on the very first night. To Danny, if he realized it was too deep, then he could just send his baby brother after the frog – rather like a retriever – “Get ‘im boy!” and off I would bound into the murky muck. Danny kept his waders, returned to the car nice and dry, and had to contend with far fewer chigger bites and ticks to extract from varying bodily locations than I.
Skeeter Repellent
Mosquitoes – skeeters – bred like, well, mosquitoes in the slow-moving streams of Southern Ohio. They were everywhere. But it always seemed as though, if we were going to forget something, it was the skeeter repellent. Danny and I had both grown up and thrived in the woods, fields, streams, lakes and associated varieties of muck that surrounded them. Insects thrived in these areas and clung to us the way stink clings to chicken manure. Much to the joy of the succeeding generations of mosquitoes, skeeter repellent was a luxury that we often lived without.
It was summer, 1970, the water was flowing slow and easy, potholes were ripe with fat bullfrogs – harvest time. Our introduction into the realm of the bullfrog was at hand.
Danny pulled his VW Bug into the narrow, shallow ditch that doubled as a parking space for fishermen, trappers, hunters, and now, bullfrog hunters. He turned the car lights off, exposing us to the suppressing dark of the night. There was no moon, and only a faint streetlight a half-mile away at Lake Margaret. The few stars that were able to penetrate the canopy of trees and overhanging brush had little effect on the night other than to add a surreal eeriness as they danced among the tree limbs. Even the lightning bugs had called it a night.
Standing beside the car, we peered through the blackness in the direction of the quiet gurgle of a rolling stream. Although neither of us said it, I am sure we both thought it – this seemed a much better idea in the daylight. But we had been in similar circumstances before and had also fished this creek; we were reasonably certain there was nothing out there that his brother couldn’t overpower while I ran back to the car. Also, we had made a financial commitment with the purchase of a new set of hip waders, a brand-new gig and accompanying bamboo pole, and one of those expensive batteries for Uncle Jules’ super-light. We were committed.
We donned our waders, and I tied the burlap bag around my waste and stuck a pair of gloves in my back pocket. We each grabbed a light and gig. “Well, I reckon we need to do this thing,” I offered to Dan.
A pale red glow illuminated Dan’s face as he took a pull from his last cigarette. “Yeah, the night’s not gettin’ any younger.”
We flipped on our flashlights. The night was intense with heat and humidity; a mist was settling over the lake, stretching its fingers across the low fields and around the little stream. Our flashlights were ineffective; the beams weighed down by the heavy night and wet air. Only the objects captured by the direct stare of the beams were illuminated. Any surrounding objects disappeared the moment the beams released them – surreal.
Just on the other side of the road, separating us from a small weed patch that bordered the stream was our first obstacle – a barbed wire fence. I truly believe that barbed wire fencing was made to keep little boys, hunters, fishermen and froggers out, not cattle in. But over the years, Danny and I had become adept at eluding the strings of jagged barbs. Charging bulls and farmers with shotgun in hand forced us to learn fast, and we could cross a barbed wire fence with the agility of a cat.
Without a word, Danny led the way across the road to the fence, pushed one foot down on the middle rung of wire and lifted hard on the upper rung, creating a hole in the fence just big enough for me to worm through, waders, gig and all. When I was through, I deftly took the wire from Danny’s hand, placed my foot beside his for him to slither through. Although we had never frogged before, we had hunted other game enough to agree that we were commencing our hunt. Silently, we snuck through the weed patch to the creek and the pothole that marked its headwaters, and then slinked onto the mud bank.
Nothing stirred but the gurgle of the meandering water that filled the pothole. We pointed our lights at our feet, not wanting to disturb life forms that lurked at the pothole’s edge, especially bullfrogs. Slowly, our eyes adjusted, and we became aware of the huge sycamore that stood several feet away on the other side of the pothole. We had noticed this tree a hundred times before, but never in the middle of a lightless night. Its thigh-sized roots curled down into the inky black water, blocking its flow, forcing the creek to churn around it, carving out the muck and debris to form the deep hole. The tree’s trunk stretched upward into the black night and out of sight. We could feel the limbs arch above us, blocking the remaining stars and creating the impression of a dark, dank cave – there was a ceiling up there somewhere blocking out the rest of the world.
Dan, always our leader, whispered first, “Slowly move ya light up the creek and I’ll look down that way. Do it real slow so we don’t spook a frog.” He said this as though he knew what he was doing. But in my hunter’s – and forming frogger’s – soul I knew he was right; everything was to be done slowly, quietly.
Unfortunately, it was about this time that I began a slow lean to my left. I had paid little mind that my feet had been sinking in mud as we stood on the bank. I tried to take a balancing step, but the boot stayed in the mud and my foot wrenched up and out of the boot part of the wader. With my foot lodged halfway up the wader – the area usually reserved for the knee – I jerked my legs hard but succeeded in freeing only the right leg, which, upon its freedom, commenced to launch itself across the stuck left leg forcing my body into a spiraling fall. I caught myself with the hand that was holding the gig while the left hand, the one holding my light, jerked and darted stupidly in an ineffective attempt to help the right hand save me. This only succeeded in throwing the light beam in about every conceivable direction, illuminating sky, tree, water, frogs, mud and Danny.
As quickly as it started, the fall was over. I lay on my right side, my head dipping slightly into the water. My right arm was aching with the strain of keeping the rest of my body from rolling into the stream. After a moment, I let go my resolve and slowly rolled into the water like a dead log. The quiet cocoon of darkness that we had worked so hard to create was shattered. I lay there, half cussing and half chuckling.
“Idiot!” Danny laughed at me, not worrying about whispering anymore. He reached a helping hand to me and pulled me from the water’s grasp.
“I couldn’t help…” I started to argue back but was interrupted by a “Thungggg…Plunk…Splash!” from the other side of the pothole.
We threw our light beams to the source of the noise and gawked at the reflection of large ripples radiating towards us from a fat splash.
“Well good!” Danny uttered his standard resolved-to-failure expression. “That was a frog!” He said it as if I had been the cause of losing the beast. While, in fact, I probably had been the cause, I was still willing to argue my case. I opened my mouth to give verbal battle, but for the second time in as many attempts, I was interrupted. “Look! Look! Over there,” Danny whispered at me. His beam was pointing at the other side of the pothole, under the sycamore’s roots.
Just behind a heavy gray root, half submerged, at the edge of the bank, lay a frog – a big frog – a creepy frog. It had not occurred to me, although I had lived and played among them my entire life, that a frog could actually get this big.
“That’s not a frog,” I whispered harshly at Danny as if he were now the idiot. “It’s too big. It must be a big rat or muskrat. Maybe it’s a little stump. Are those eyes? Look at those eyes shinin’! They look like fire!” But as we further analyzed the great beast, stunned by the fierce beams lancing into its bulging eyes, we concluded that it was indeed a frog.
The animal’s yellow-white underbelly divided it nearly in half, running the length of its body from the bottom of its mouth to the tips of its legs. The top half of the body formed the characteristic frog shape, black against the mud background, silhouetted and made even larger by the long shadow it cast from our lights. And its glowing, penetrating eyes dared us.
My mind immediately raced to the idea that, just perhaps, this was indeed too much frog for our first giggin’ attempt; we should start with something a bit smaller and work our way up. But Danny was quick, “Get ya gig and wade over to ‘im. I’ll hold the beam on ‘im,” he ordered. Sure, I thought, you do the easy part. But I was already soaked, so was probably the right brother to sacrifice.
Despite my reservations, I set my mind to the hunter mode that I had honed to near perfection over the past several years – my mind and body reacted. I first unsnapped the waders and eased out of them. They would be of no use; I was already soaked, and my leg was still stuck halfway up one leg. Better to take them off. I stood at the water’s edge in my socks and cutoff shorts. While the socks may have been powerless against any glass, roots, rocks, beasts, or otherwise that might be lurking on the bottom of the pothole to feast on my feet or other appendages, I still kept them on, if for nothing more than the impression of security. I sharpened my focus on the behemoth at the end of Danny’s beam, picked up my gig and sacrificed my body to the black stream.
Within a couple of feet of shore, the pothole went from a few inches deep to nearly six feet. The water swiftly rose to my chest as my feet slid down a muddy drop-off. About halfway down the slope my feet caught on something, and I hastily jerked them up from its maw. This caused my body to quickly, but quietly descend into the gloom. For some idiotic reason, in my panic, I felt it was important to keep the gig above surface. Danny’s eyes were torn from the frog for a moment to witness my inane struggle: a swirl in the dark, a lonely shadow under the water’s surface with only a hand frantically holding a giggin’ pole above, and but a ghost of terror from below. He smirked and quietly informed the frog, “Well good. I don’t know who’s stupider, you or my brother.” He didn’t mean our brother Gary.
It’s funny the things you think of when your head is submerged in brackish water in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night when your brother is obviously making no attempt to save your life. In addition to involuntarily trying to save the gig, my mind raced to wondering just what might be going through that frog’s mind. In my panic, I imagined it contemplating turning the tables on these two fools that had clumsily entered its domain and seize the opportunity to attack. I convinced myself that at any moment I would feel the beast land on my head and push me to the bottom, or worse, wrap its slime-covered body around my face to smoother me in frog drippings.
But the frog apparently had other peculiarities in mind and allowed me the time to stretch my toes to the bottom and push my head above the water’s surface…and sanity. I quickly cleared my eyes of the slime and sweat – o yeah! I was sweating now. I tried to look around to orient myself, but the only thing my eyes could focus on was the harsh glare of Dan’s light beam slicing directly into me. I gathered myself and, still in hunter mode, shot Dan a fierce whisper, “What are ya doin’? Don’t shine the light in my eyes!”
“I’m not,” Dan calmly came back, still in hunter mode. “Turn around.”
The hairs on the back of my neck – although plastered down by the natural slimy hair tonic that was inherent to the surface of very still potholes – rose in a steady wave of dread that started in my shoulders, ran over my neck, up my head and ended in a pulsing rush in my ears. At the time it was agreed upon that swearing was something that Danny didn’t abide by, but under my breath I only had two words, “O sheeit!”
My toes dug at the bottom of the pool and tiptoed my body around. Everything was quiet – no bugs buzzed, no frogs croaked, no water splashed, no brother whispered. I was alone with the creature that patiently waited behind me.
I completed my turn and focused on the object of Dan’s beam. A mere three feet from my head and half the size of my head, eyeball to eyeball with me, sat the frog.
My eyes then engraved in my mind a picture that would accompany me throughout life – the brute was smiling. The white undersurface of its body wrapped to under the corners of its mouth, giving the frog the appearance of full lips, stretched taught over big white teeth – frogs don’t have “big white teeth” but you couldn’t tell me that then – in a teasing smile. Dan’s light beam reflected into its eyes and back into me, so that I was the one paralyzed, not the beast. It held my gaze for a few terrible seconds. I didn’t move. The gig floated on the water’s surface barely supported by my limp hand.
Get it Rod!” Dan broke the silence and shocked me back into my own mind. I blinked, breaking the frog’s trance-like hold over me. With an air of nonchalance, the frog cocked its head, adjusted its body and sprung. I would have sworn that the creature was going to land directly on my neck and suck the life from me. But his entry was merciful, and as Dan’s light illuminated the frog’s form streaking by my head and over my shoulder, I would have sworn he tossed me a merciful smirk when our eyes were but inches from each other, as if to say, no more chances big boy. He knew exactly what he was doing.
In panic, I turned, hurled the gig towards the bank, and swam-ran as fast as the sucking mud and thick water would allow, using the something that lay halfway up the drop-off to propel my body out of the water and into a heap on the muddy bank at Danny’s feet.
After a stunned moment I heard Danny. His laughter was so intense that he could barely breathe. At first, I thought he was crying. Had I impaled him with the gig? I caught a glimpse of him kneeling in the mud as if in prayer, bent over with his head in his hands. A raucous gaseous undulation ripped at the seams of his waders, which caused him to nearly pass out, unable to catch his breath from yet another wave of stupefying laughter. But then the hilarity of the situation infected me, and I too began to laugh, possibly in combination with the relief in the revelation that I had survived.
Brothers will be brothers and boys will be boys. And as such, we took it upon ourselves to fulfill the generations-long roles of boys and brothers: we rolled in the creek gravel and mud, laughing so hard we could barely breathe and then refueled the laughter with timely bodily blasts and various other performances that only boys and brothers, and occasionally fathers, always boys at heart, can appreciate.
At last, Danny wiped the tears out of his eyes, which left streaks of mud around them giving him the appearance, at least in my depraved mind, of a raccoon. I tore into another minute-long rift of laughter. But that soon subsided since Danny couldn’t see the humor.
We both staggered to our feet. Danny found a cigarette and I found a weed patch that needed some watering. “Well good,” Danny offered. “We missed our first frog.”
“Ya know Dan, I’m sorta glad we didn’t get that frog. He was too big for our first one. We need to start with somethin’ smaller and work our way up.” I stumbled through the weeds and collected the gig that rested deep into the weed field.
“What do you mean? All the frogs are gonna be that big. They’re just frogs anyway. They can’t hurt ya,” Danny began to argue.
“Well, then you can get the next one. I’m not goin’ up to my neck in that crap eyeball to eyeball with a frog like that.” I argued back.
I picked my way through the weeds and fence to the car and got my tennis shoes. I was soaked to the gills so there was no need to worry with waders anymore. I returned to the bank and Dan. We gathered our supplies and recommenced our night foray. It was difficult to believe, after all the excitement of the past few minutes, but we had only just begun.
After several years during which we honed our froggin skills, Danny and I would get the largest frog we ever got from the pothole maybe 50 yards downstream from where this first adventure took place. When stretched out, from tip of head to tip of toe, the frog was 22 inches long. I don’t know if this is any kind of record, but I ain’t pullin’ ya leg on this one. That was one big frog. But in the back of my mind, I either don’t believe or don’t want to believe, that it was the one that got away that first night.
Life is a wonderful adventure, my grandchildren, full of ups and downs, overs and unders, all with a few potholes along the way. It is surprising what might be lurking in those potholes. From time to time, you might want to stop and take a look.
Continuing from That’s not a Frog where Danny and I encounter our first bullfrog…where I barely escaped with my life (well, as I saw it anyway).
I went back to the car and got my tennis shoes. We gathered our supplies and recommenced our night foray. It was difficult to believe, after all the excitement of the past few minutes, that we had only just begun.
Having fished and trapped the creek many times before, we knew there was a long, shallow rapid before the next pothole. We splashed along the shallow water talking in normal conversational tones secure in the knowledge that our quarry would not be hiding along these banks. Having lived as much in the woods and on creek banks as in houses, we were already comfortable with the night, its sounds and motions. We felt quite secure; we had been here before but this time it was just darker.
But no sooner did our sense of security settle in than Dan abruptly sloshed to a halt and threw his arm across my path. “Hush! Look!” he barked at me under his breath. Dan’s light revealed white stripes set in silky black motion just a few feet ahead. Crossing our path, as bold and proud as a little queen, strode a mother skunk with four kits following close behind. She seemed undaunted by the light; almost certainly secure in the fact that she could handle just about anything that came her way. Her tail was raised in warning, but she made no effort to hurry herself or her little ones. She was going to take her time and we were going to let her. And we did.
Skunks had to be one of the most respected of all animals in those parts. Nearly everyone I knew had tangled with at least one skunk, and always lost. Every puppy that was not encumbered by a chain or fence had received enough doses of skunk spray to quickly learn that this was not the prey for them; there were far easier animals in the forest.
After the little family had passed, we slid to the bank to take a rest and give the mother a good long time to vacate the area. We watched a couple of snakes float lazily down the creek. It then dawned on us that we rarely saw skunks, snakes, frogs, or most any other critter, during the day unless we just happened on them. But now, at night, they almost seemed to be seeking us out. “These animals are all nocturnal,” I informed Dan, remembering some of the biology I had taken that year. “I think we’re gonna see a bunch of stuff out here in the night.”
“Yeah, I’m afraid you might be right,” Danny agreed hollowly. Dan was not a fan of snakes. He had danced his way around enough Copperheads, Rattlers, Black Snakes and other assorted varieties over the years to develop a healthy respect for them. His light followed a third snake as it slid onto the opposite shore, apparently not at all concerned with our presence. The comfort we thought we had found quickly dissipated and the night closed around us once again. But this time, it had its critters with it. Every sound was a new sound that made us stop to ponder just what on earth could be its cause.
Still, we were here for a purpose – to gig frogs. We had been in tougher, scarier spots before, hadn’t we? Dan soaked his cigarette in the stream and then buried it in the mud. “Let’s get goin,” he boldly ordered. Once again, we stepped into the stream to pursue our prey. But this time we were a few inches closer to each other, there was far less splash in our steps, and far more caution.
We crept up to the next pothole. This one was narrow, five or six feet across, 20 feet long and chin deep. Several years earlier a tree had fallen across it, dividing it neatly in half. The water languished maybe ten inches below the two-foot wide trunk. This was a beloved pothole. It was here that I had taken a three-pound smallmouth bass just the summer before. We had great expectations that it would produce an equally ample frog.
Even in daylight, while fishing, we had never crossed under that log, afraid that a snake or some other living thing, lying in wait on the other side of the trunk, might drop on us as we passed under it. It brought to mind that one time we had stepped over a huge log in the forest to then turn and witness a Copperhead that had been too lazy to strike. And that was in the daylight; this was the dead of night.
Without a word, as if we had been doing this all our lives, our lights’ beams slipped under the trunk and landed on a large frog resting on the bank a few feet beyond on the other side of the pothole. Dan signaled me to step into the water. I had a little signal of my own for him, which he didn’t see. But since I had not immediately obeyed him, he harshed at me, “Go get ‘im.” Yep, like a dog.
“I’m goin’ around the tree on the hill.” I whined.
“No, he’ll get away. Go under the log.” Dan knew what he was asking me to do. But this was too important; it might be our first frog.
“You go under the log. I’ll hold the light,” I reasoned.
“I can’t; it’s over my waders.” Dang! He had me.
I gave Danny my light and stepped into the pool. As with the first pothole, the first step had me sliding down a slope and right up to my chest in the calm gloom. But this time I was ready and controlled the slide. It helped that the thing that had grabbed my feet in the first pothole decided not to follow us to this one. A stealthy hunter, I allowed barely a ripple to emanate from my body. The frog, 15 feet away, didn’t move, paralyzed by Danny’s light. I aimed my gig at the animal, dug my toes into the muddy bottom, and crept forward.
It was easy to creep along the first few feet to the log and I made good, quiet progress. The frog didn’t move. Our giggin pole was about ten feet long and the frog was no more than five feet on the other side of the log. I was gonna be able to do this without going under the log. This was a joyful realization, which caused me to be almost giddy with excitement.
I gently pushed the gig toward the frog and got it within about two feet when a minor commotion from Dan disrupted his light beam, which fell away from the frog, whirled around the surrounding undergrowth and then back where the frog had been. That brief amount of time was all the frog had required to realize that something was amiss. But rather than jump away, he merely walked a few feet down the bank.
“Well good!” I echoed Dan’s standard in a normal conversational tone, half hoping the frog would take this as a signal to jump away. But it just sat there, tempting me, a decoy to lure me to my doom.
From behind, Dan’s pitiful, whiny voice caught up to me, “Sorry. I had to adjust my feet.” In Dan’s defense, he was indeed holding the light at a very awkward angle because he had to keep the beam down low so it could make it under the log. Now, I can understand that, but at the time, chin deep in black water with a who-knows-what getting ready to pounce on me from the log, and remembering that those snakes we saw earlier were heading towards this pothole, I wasn’t inclined to be very forgiving.
“Well, I can’t get it now,” I shot back to Dan. I was no longer whispering and almost yelling. The frog didn’t seem to care. He just sat there taking in the show.
Dan used his best friendly brother’s voice and whispered soothingly, “Rod. Ya almost got ‘im now. Just ease under the log a little bit, gig ‘im, and then come back real fast. It’s okay.” If I had been a dog standing beside him, I think he would have patted me on the back and rubbed behind my ears. Whatever, it worked. I gazed up at the outline of the huge, moss-covered log now looming almost directly over me, zeroed in on the two big eyes glowing into mine, and eased forward. Idiot.
Now that I was committed, I didn’t hesitate; I reached the log and slinked under it. For the brief moment that I was entombed between it and the water, with my chin resting on the water’s surface and the log no more than six inches above my head, I felt overwhelmingly trapped – claustrophobic. My mind settled onto those two snakes that were here somewhere and how they could easily scare the life out of me by taking this opportunity to simply slide into the water from the log or lazily swim by my head. I was only 16 or 17, but I knew if anything remotely out of the ordinary decided to make a presence at this moment, I would die cold-dead of a heart attack right on the spot. I envisioned rats, spiders, muskrats, snakes, frogs, toads and an array of unknown creatures all lining up to be the first to feast upon my lifeless form.
Intent on my survival, I made quick work of the task at hand. I hunkered my shoulders trying to make the opening into my shirt as small as possible and continued forward into the second half of the pool. Nothing. I was alive.
The frog simply sat, watching, stunned by the unreal scene or the harsh light, I wasn’t sure. Without hesitation, anxious to survive this part of the story to tell the tale at some later date, I poised my three-pronged gig at his head, inched to within six inches, and then thrust at him.
I lifted the pole. Impaled on the other end, the frog danced and squirmed for freedom, ignoring the gigs protruding through its body. Without hesitation I turned, averted my eyes as best I could from the log and the things resting on it that awaited me, and ran-swam back to the source of the light and plunked my dripping form by Dan.
“Let’s see! Let’s see!” Dan chuckled, dancing around like a little boy.
I placed the frog-laden gig end of the pole on the muddy shore between us. The frog, sensing the ground beneath its feet, began jumping for all it was worth, pulling the pole along with him. This guy apparently didn’t feel those barbs protruding through his body. I lifted the pole so he was once again dangling in the air. He kicked a couple of times and then resigned himself to his fate and let his long legs droop.
Our lights crisscrossed the night sky trying to zero in on the sedate form dangling at the far end of the giggin pole. After a long contemplative moment I asked, “Now what?”
“Take him off the gig,” Danny said. But this wasn’t a suggestion that one of us take him off the gig; it was a quiet order – Take him off the gig Rod.
My joy quickly turned to frustration. “No Danny! It’s your turn to do somethin’. I’ve been doin’ all the dirty work,” I whined. I pulled the gloves we brought along for just such an occasion from my back pocket and offered them to my brother. He looked at the sopping cloth that dripped in my hand, then to the frog and back to me. He grinned his standard not-in-your-lifetime tight-lipped grin that spread from one side of his face to the other, raised his eyebrows, and simply shook his head, no.
A marginally heated argument ensued. The critters that witnessed this little drama probably got a good snicker at the comical enactment: two idiots, one drenched with pothole slime and debris, the other standing in boots up to his crotch, and a forlorn bullfrog rocking back and forth at the end of a pole between them. The two idiots whispered as loudly as they could without breaking into an out-and-out yelling match. But finally, one caved.
“Alright, ya win! I’ll take the stupid frog off the gig,” Danny agreed. What? I had won? I never won.
Danny grabbed the pole from my hand, the frog jerked wildly at the other end. Danny flipped the gig onto the bank and stepped on the frog’s head and began to pull the gig out. The frog protested by kicking its hind legs and as if on cue from Danny, allowed a little groan to escape its throat, which added a bizarre twist to the already bizarre scene.
As Danny pulled a little harder, I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Stop! Let me do it.” He immediately stopped and casually removed his foot from the frog’s head, as if he had planned it this way all along and was waiting for my queue. Apparently, the frog had suffered little, and tried once again to spring away. Danny – and perhaps even the frog – had played me like a fish.
Danny lifted the gig and once again the frog dangled between us. I looked at the forlorn little animal and felt a pang of sorrow for it; it had the unenviable fate of being our first frog. It was our experimental frog, the one that would sacrifice so much for us. – You know how your first kid is your guinea pig kid? You experiment and learn on them so the others don’t have to suffer. They don’t always turn out quite right. Well, this frog had the misfortune of having that place in our froggin exploits.
Motivated by a pang of sympathy for the creature, with Danny holding the pole, I quickly and unceremoniously wrapped both gloved hands around its 14-inch long body. I pulled quickly and cleanly and he popped off the gig like a cork pops from a champagne bottle. He squirmed and rolled in my hands as if the gig had been nothing more than a slight annoyance. Danny dropped the gig, opened the burlap sack, and I tossed the frog in. There ya go; our first frog was in the bag.
And there, cast in stone was the procedure that we would use forever more to remove a frog from our gigs. To this very day I don’t recall Danny having ever actually touched the first frog until after it had been dipped in batter and fried to a crisp tender morsel of pure white meat.
For the next few hours Danny and I labored over the potholes in search of our prey. By about 3:00 AM, we had managed to collect another six bullfrogs. We became fairly accustomed to the muskrats, possums, and other critters we saw along the way. We even managed to feel somewhat safe with the sight of hundreds of snakes seemingly oblivious to our passage. Generally, we figured if they weren’t making a fuss at us or didn’t happen to be under foot, or worse, under chin, then there was no harm. I can’t recall one of these water snakes ever making an aggressive move, but they did on occasion tend to sneak up on us, which could cause no end of excitement and panicked run-swimming for the shore. Such was the case a couple of years later when Danny and I were froggin with a few of my buddies, but that is another story.
Now, it was time to head home with our quarry and figure out how to turn them from frogs into frog legs.
While on the froggin’ theme, I should probably put this little ditty in from when I was just a pup.
All bullfrog hunters have to have their real start – the one that comes long before the inaugural voyage into a dark stream welled with the shadow of night. I think this was mine. I was a toad hunter long before I hunted the mighty bullfrog.
One of the things that I enjoyed the most when visiting Mammaw and Pappaw Lewis (grandma and grandpa) was my toad hunting adventures. There really wasn’t too much adventure to it but for a six-year-old, it was no less than an exciting quest.
The Lewis home on route 5 had a full-sized basement with windows at the top of the walls. To let light into the basement, a galvanized tin-lined hole about 12 inches deep and 18 inches out from the window was placed at each window. The sides were straight up and down so that if a small animal (say toad or frog) merrily jumped in, then it was not going to easily jump out. If I was patient enough and waited three or four days, sometimes as many as five toads and the occasional frog would accumulate in each of these traps. This, of course, was a little boy’s dream come true. To see so many cool animals all in one place!
I didn’t do much with my prizes because I, like most kids back then, believed that if a toad or frog peed on you, then you would get warts. And, of course, every time you picked up a toad, it peed on you; they were scared and the first thing that came to mind was probably to pee. After some looking, poking and prodding, I would gently gather them up and let them out of their prison. I wonder how many times I caught the same toad?
Danny and I returned from our first froggin trip. We pulled into his driveway about 3:30 AM. All sane people were asleep. The sun was still snoozing over the horizon. But for Danny, our first burlap bag of bullfrogs, and me, the night still held stories.
“Can we do this later Dan?” I whined, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, substituting it with pothole slime and frog secretions. I knew better than to ask such a question. As good hunters and fishermen, we knew the importance of cleaning our game immediately upon arriving home. Otherwise, the meat could spoil, or worse, you might get in the car a couple of days later and wonder what that rancid smell was, and then remember that you had indeed caught a couple of bass a few days back. Each good hunter or fisherman only makes that mistake once. – One of the very worst things a sportsman can do is to kill their game and then not take care of it. Of course, the term ‘sportsman’ does not apply to them. The hunters and fishermen I have associated with took care of their game and if they didn’t eat it themselves, they found someone that did enjoy it.
“No, we gotta follow this through,” Danny moaned. He was no more excited about liberating these frogs from their legs than I was, and he was no less sleepy. But when he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, he was at least fortunate enough to only smear pothole slime into them, still having refrained from touching one of our quarry. We dragged ourselves and the bag of frogs from the car.
Frogs are tough critters. They can survive a direct hit to any part of their body with a sharp gig and survive, seemingly unharmed, for a very long time. In fact, in my entire froggin career – which spanned a good seven years – I only managed to kill one frog straight out while giggin it. The gig hit it directly in the brain. Except for that one very fortunate bullfrog, all others had to undergo the processing described below. This is not a particularly pretty episode in our froggin careers, and we are not particularly proud of it, but it was indeed a major part of the experience. In the end, we did the right thing and put the frogs out of their pain quickly – we hoped – but it was the getting there that was a bit disturbing.
“So, how do we do this Dan?” I asked my all-knowing brother. Dan was pretty good at assessing most any situation and coming up with a plan. Although his plans were sometimes flawed, they at least gave us a starting point.
After some deep cogitation, Dan came up with the idea of pithing the things. “Well, it worked in high school, right? I guess we can just pith’em.”
That seemed a good idea to me. “What should we use to pith’em? We need more than just a pin,” I surmised aloud.
“Ice pick,” Dan said after a few more moments. Funny the things grown men and boys decide to do with kitchen utensils in the middle of the night. O, if only the women knew what bizarre rights those utensils had participated in – I suspect they would never use them again.
“Hmm. That should work. Good idea,” I agreed again. “So, it’s your turn to hold down the frog and do that. I’ve been pullin’ ‘em off the gig all night and carryin’ ‘em slung over my back.”
Again, Dan cogitated deeply, but this time accompanied it by the lighting of a fresh Kool cigarette, giving the moment something of a James Dean effect. “Ya’ve been doin’ the dirty work all night, Rod. Ya should just finish it up and that way, next time I’ll do the dirty work. That way we always know whose turn it is,” Danny lied.
After all the years of hunting and fishing with Dan, I should have known better. But I thought maybe this time my brother had turned the corner, having seen me flail over my head in snake and spider infested waters the entire night, chasing bullfrogs and ripping them from gigs. My dear brother had finally felt my pain. It didn’t occur to me that pain was the very same reason that he was lying through his teeth, and merely buying time to discover a better reason to avoid the dirty work for the next frog-cleaning episode.
“Okay, ya gotta deal,” I agreed, and we set to our grisly task.
Under the soft glow of the single light at the corner of the garage, I reached my glove-covered hand into the bag. – Later in our froggin career, I would become accustomed to handling frogs without gloves; they really weren’t slimy at all. Not using gloves was a characteristic I considered a hallmark of a true froggin man, which I considered myself to be. – The unfortunate frog that happened into my hand was the first one we had gigged – our guinea pig frog – poor thing. He squirmed and rolled in my hands with the same strength and determination of a frog that benefited from not having three gig holes penetrating his body. I was still quite the rooky at holding such large frogs, so that it didn’t take much effort on his part to escape. He bounded from my hands, onto the driveway and into the yard. Gone.
A wild chase ensued. Danny ran to the car and grabbed a flashlight and squawked directions at me as I leaped always one leap behind the beast. Bullfrogs, when chased, can leap a good ten feet in one bound. People, when chasing them, can only manage about five feet. So as the frog hopped gracefully into the night, I jumped after it, sprawled on the ground, crawled in the dew-laden grass a few feet, rose up and jumped at the frog again. The frog and I did this little dance for a good minute until Danny finally succeeded in getting in front of it to get the light in its eyes and hypnotize it. Expecting the frog to make yet another spectacular leap, I pounced on it with a ferocity only fatigue and frustration could deliver. Stunned by the light, it didn’t move, and the entire weight of my bounding body slammed into it. “O puke!” I whined in disgust.
Danny cringed. “Well, I guess it’s dead now.” Did I hear a bit of ridicule in that voice?
I started to respond in an equally ridiculing voice, but as I raised my body from what I expected to be a slimy mass of green, the frog jumped out from under me with even more intensity, determined to make the ditch only a few feet away. If it reached that ditch, we would not find it.
As the frog passed between a couple of shrubs that were the final barrier between it and freedom, I made a desperate lunge for its vanishing hindquarters. The upper part of my body pierced the shrubs and my hands, seemingly directed by supreme intervention, neatly folded around the frog.
Dan must have been getting used to seeing me in comical positions that night, because I only heard a few chuckles as he approached. I dangled limply in the bushes; arms on one side, head and shoulders trapped inside, and my legs dangling on Danny’s side. “Well, I reckon we lost a frog,” Danny whined, as if it was all my fault.
I refrained from telling him I had the frog. “Help me out. Pull my legs. My hands are stuck.” Danny helped me from the bushes. I held the forlorn frog out to my brother. It appeared to be a little smaller now, resigned and pitiful, having finally given up to the two idiots that made such a deal over its capture. The frog rested in my hands, but I didn’t feel very victorious. “Let’s get this over with,” I implored Dan. He agreed.
Caution: Following is the main horror section of the froggin story. If you are particularly squeamish, you might want to bypass this section and go down to Fry’em Up.
Back under the glow of Danny’s garage light, which now doubled as a surgical lamp, we discussed the impending procedure. “Okay, well, go ahead and pith him.” Danny held the ice pick out to me with the nonchalance that indicated we had done this hundreds of times before, while in fact, I had always been able to get my lab partner to do it in school. This was my first time – poor frog.
“Where ya reckon his brain is?” I asked Dan.
“Well, I figure it’s in his head somewhere,” Dan chortled.
Since I was the one holding a frog in one hand and an ice pick in the other, I didn’t see the humor. I grunted, tiring quickly of our inability to do anything, held the frog down on the cardboard operating table, poised the ice pick over where I thought its brain might be, and looked up to Danny for reassurance. “What d’ya think?” I asked my brother.
“Looks good to me,” Danny surmised. “Do it.”
I pushed the ice pick through the frog’s head. It squirmed a little in my grasp but then quieted and lay still. “Well, that wasn’t so bad,” I said as I pulled the ice pick out. Danny held the knife out to me, and I let go of the frog to take it. At that moment the frog once again sprung into the back yard. I gawked at Danny. “Well good!”
Another chase resulted. But having learned from the previous chase, we quickly captured the little creature and placed him back on the operating table.
“Do it again,” Danny suggested. I did, with the same result; the frog refused to die. Time after time I found a new place where I thought its brain might be and poked the ice pick through. And time after time, the frog made another passionate attempt at life.
“Sheesh Rod. Just kill it.” Dan challenged me.
“You wanna do it!?” I threw back at him. I knew that would shut him up.
“Okay, let’s do it like this,” he said softly, soothingly, as if calming a madman. He sensed a bit of fraying around the edges. I was cracking fast, and he needed to take control. “Let’s take this frog over to the yard and ram the ice pick through a new place in its head and stick it all the way through into the ground. Then we just let it die there while we are working on another one.”
“Sounds good to me.” Obviously, the stress had gotten to both of us.
We did as Dan said and left the poor frog pinned to the ground to die. This was one of the lowest points in our combined hunting and fishing careers, and one I am quite certain neither of us was proud of. Still, this is a true story and sometimes the truth is even weirder than stuff you make up.
Before reaching into the bag for our next patient, we sat back against the garage to rest and think things through. This was getting out of hand fast, and we needed a new approach. We weren’t going to impale every frog we had on an ice pick and wait for it to die. We needed a better – much better – plan.
Danny pulled a long draft from another Kool and pushed a long, thoughtful trail of smoke from his lungs. We sat sweating in the humid night, which was quickly becoming morning, bemused by the smoke as it drifted past the sphere of light surrounding us and disappearing into the black early-morning sky. Sleep begged at us, but we were determined to somehow see this through.
“Okay, let’s just hit ’em on the head with a hammer,” Danny blurted out.
I stared at him, mentally collapsed and sighed, “Dan, I can’t bring myself to hit a frog on the head with a hammer. Your gonna have to do that one.”
“Okay, you hold it by the legs and stretch it out on the cardboard in front of me and I’ll hit it on the head with a hammer,” he agreed. I was shocked; Danny was actually willing to take a role that I refused? But after reflecting on it, I realized he didn’t actually have to touch the frog, so it made perfect sense that he would be willing to hit it. He had gigged as many frogs as I. Apparently, as long as there was something between the frog and him, I guess he was good with it. We had a deal.
I reached into the bag and felt around for one of the smaller frogs, about 12 inches long when stretched out. Danny went into the garage and got a hammer. When he returned, I had the frog secured by the hind legs. With his jumping power literally in my grasp, he was completely subdued – this guy was going nowhere.
I held the frog stretched out on the cardboard towards Dan and then quickly pulled it away. “Now, don’t hit it yet. Practice hitting it a couple of times. Don’t hit it so hard it explodes all over us. Just hit it enough t’ just kill it.” The last thing I wanted splashing all over us was frog brains, eyes, and other associated gore.
Dan neatly struck the hammer against the cardboard a few times to get what we considered to be about the right force to ‘just kill it.’ “That’s about right, don’t ya think?” Dan asked me after the third blow with about the same force as its two predecessors.
“Yeah, that otta do it.” I stretched the victim back out to Dan.
Dan zeroed the hammer over the frog’s head, swung the hammer back to past his own head and came down with a force probably five times what we had just agreed on. The blow hit the frog directly between the eyes and commenced to penetrate through the head and down into the cardboard. The frog stiffened in my gloved hand, but I still felt the quivering meat of its legs through the glove. I let go of the frog, walked over to the rail overlooking Dan’s back yard and nearly threw up. “O puke! I feel sick,” was all I could utter.
For the second time that night I heard Danny laughing so hard he could barely breathe. I knew that he hadn’t done it intentionally; we had something of a gentleman’s agreement for things like that.
I started to turn back to give Danny the required scolding when I looked out into the yard where the other frog – the one with the ice pick in its head – was supposed to be. “Dan, where’s that other frog?”
“What?” Danny answered, barely able to talk, still trying to catch his breath.
With a little concern in my voice, “That other frog isn’t where we left it. Shine your light out there.”
The laughter immediately stopped, and Dan slung the light out onto the lawn. No frog. “Do ya think a cat or coon got it? Where’s Ben?” Danny asked, wondering if perhaps his bird dog had found the frog interesting enough to carry away.
“I saw Ben in his pen when we were chasing the frog in the back yard,” I answered. “Maybe we should go out and look for it.”
You’ve seen those horror movies where someone – an idiot – opens the door in the haunted mansion and everyone in the audience is warning them, “Don’t go in there! Don’t go in there!” Although the person could have simply turned and walked away, they chose to open the rotten door with the rusty doorknob and come face to face with a thing on the other side that commences to maul them. The situation Danny and I now faced was quite similar to that; we really didn’t need to go after that frog, but something – a strong sense of compassion for the little beast – drove us.
We stepped into the wet lawn, our lights twinkling over its surface in small swaths directly in front of us – we didn’t want anything to, literally, jump out at us from under our feet, which, given the tenacity of this frog, seemed not an unlikely scenario. You have probably noticed in those horror movies how one person decides to go one way in the haunted mansion by themselves and the other person goes the opposite direction, this so the thing had more time to devour and digest one before having to deal with the other. Danny and I had seen a lot of those movies, so didn’t subscribe to that approach; we crept along shoulder-to-shoulder.
We warily rounded the corner of Dan’s garage. The reflections of our beams caught something small and white a few feet away. “What’s that?” Dan asked, throwing his beam on it. “It’s moving!”
Our minds took a few moments to adapt to what our eyes were witnessing. It was indeed the frog. He was pulling himself towards the ditch as best he could but was unable to make good progress – he was dragging the ice pick that still pierced his head! Both Danny and I momentarily stood silent, amazed as we watched the animal drag its body, occasionally trying to jump, but managing only to sling its back legs over its impaled head to sprawl momentarily on its back. It would then contort its frame to a semi-upright position and continue its efforts to attain the freedom of the ditch.
But after those few brief moments of horror at witnessing a scene that would stay with us throughout our lives, we were compelled by humanity to do the right thing. I don’t believe we uttered a word to each other, but simply jumped into action. I picked the little beast up and removed the ice pick. We then hastened him back to the cardboard. I held his legs and shoved him out to Danny, who then used the hammer to put him out of his misery.
For another half hour, Danny and I set to the task of cleaning the frogs. It turned out that our guinea pig frog had not suffered in vain. The hammer blow that Danny delivered to its head was perfect. It was strong enough to ‘just kill it’ while refraining from disintegrating its head and making me sick. Danny carried that knowledge forward and became an expert at hitting frogs on the head with a hammer – not something he would want to include on his resume, I suspect, but a useful skill, nonetheless. We never tried to pith a frog again – leaving that little chore to high school lab partners – and cleaned the ice pick thoroughly with soap and bleach so Mona would be none the wiser.
Uncle Jules had told us that we wanted to eat more than just the legs of the frog. According to him there was good meat up in the body above the hind legs. But, as the resident bullfrog surgeon, performing exploratory surgery on the lower abdomen of a bullfrog did not appeal to me, so we decided to forego that little chore; cutting the legs off at the highest point just below the abdomen was fine. After removing the skin and flipper feet, the quantity of meat was impressive, with most of those legs turning out to be as big as drumsticks on small chickens.
And it is indeed true that frog legs jump around when being fried. But Danny and I became so proficient at frog cleaning that we discovered a sewing-thread-thick white cord that ran down the center of a frog’s leg. It was an easy task to pull the cord from the leg, which kept the leg from trying to jump out of the frying pan.
And there is no doubt, after one gets beyond the idea that they are eating a frog, that the taste of a bullfrog’s leg is absolutely superb. The meat is translucent white before it is fried. We simply rolled ours in flour and fried it in a skillet of hot oil. When cooked, the meat was as white as the paper this page is printed on, and flaked off the bone in succulent, bite-sized morsels. As I write this story, I cannot think of a more palatable meat than frog’s legs – period. The only thing that could make them better was a mess of fresh-caught smallmouth bass, a few morel mushrooms on the side, and a big Mason jar full of ice-cold Coke – Appalachian epicurean delight.
Dan and I had already made several successful froggin’ trips by this time and decided to invite some of my friends along with us on one of our late-night adventures into the night-creeks of Southern Ohio.
It was a night identical to our first froggin trip – air thick with moisture and insects, pitch black and alive with the critters of the night. Danny and I had honed our frog hunting skills to peak performance. I had bragged to my buddies, Phil, and brothers Mike and Doug, about our froggin exploits.
Mike and Doug were already established hunters and fishers, excited to find yet another creature to test their skills. Phil, on the other hand, was a novice. I had taken him as my apprentice. Everything he knew about hunting and fishing he had learned from me. Needless to say, he had blossomed into quite the hunter and was even showing early signs of competent fishing sense. He wanted to move on to froggin. I knew better than to let a rookie outdoorsman take this critical next step so early in his outdoor career; it had even taken me several years to work up the nerve to hunt the great bullfrog. But I was anxious to show my prowess as not only a frog hunter, but also a master of the outdoors. The results of that night’s froggin trip and the long-term effects on Phil’s psyche were a result of my overzealous desire to impart wisdom onto my neophyte; I take full responsibility.
One of the best terms I can think of to describe Phil is high strung. He was as solid as a rock and twice as strong because his body was as tense as a ball of tight-wound rubber bands, involuntarily flexing and stretching at all times. I always had the impression that if someone snuck up behind him and said “boo” he would explode into a quivering mass of flesh and muscle. His eyeballs would penetrate from the goop back into the culprit and still somehow kick his butt. Phil was a nice guy, fortunately, and got along with everyone in a tight-jawed, muscle-flexed sort of way.
Given Phil’s state of continuous excitement, it rather amazed me that he was able to calm down enough to sneak up on squirrels and birds during our hunts, and even had the patience to catch the occasional fish. Again, good teaching.
But on this night, as the five of us stood at the head of a small rapid in the lower end of a particularly long and promising pothole, I would witness Phil’s unraveling. From nearly the moment we entered the creek a half hour earlier, Phil had been on edge. If at all possible, he was even more taut than normal. It was the snakes – hundreds upon hundreds of twisting, swimming, sneaking little beasts. It turned out, as he would confess later, that Phil was deathly afraid of snakes.
The five of us spread out with Phil in the middle, furthest from the shorelines and, he surmised, the snakes. Indeed, most of the serpents we had seen had been on the land and in trees, so the middle of the stream seemed a safe place.
Our flashlights scoured each bank from the water’s edge, up the muddy slopes and a few feet up into the adjoining weeds. It took time and concentration to search for the telltale glowing eyes, or black frog shape against the dark background, if it happened to be turned away from us. Without realizing, we had slowly descended deeper into the cool water, paying little attention to anything directly in front of us, too intent on our search beams. Even Phil was in hunter mode. I was proud.
Up to our waists now, Danny zeroed in on the large, bulging eyes of a bullfrog 15 feet ahead on the right shore. The five of us, focused, bunched together, elbow to elbow, began a slow, methodical wade towards the critter. Phil was still in the middle, protected. There was nothing; the quiet of the black night surrounded our half-sunk bodies, our beams captured by the bullfrog lazing a few feet away. The only noises were those of the night: our excited whispers – instructions to the unskilled – annoying hum of mosquitoes, fly or beetle; the gurgle of the small rapid that tumbled down the creek behind us; and the occasional soft flick of something against the pool’s calm surface ahead of us – probably a minnow jumping, trying to avoid being a midnight snack for some larger fish.
Huddled together, our little group inched forward, submerging ever so slightly into the shadowy liquid. The soft flicks grew more numerous and a bit more enthusiastic – must have been a whole school of minnows. They seemed our only companions now, the mosquitoes and beetles having settled down to watch the story unfold. The flicks continued to inch toward us ever so slightly, drifting with the slow current. The frog sat patiently on the bank, either awaiting his fate or enjoying the show – I suspect the latter.
“What are all those minners doin’? They all just bunched together,” Danny whispered at me. “Hold ya light on the frog, Rod. I’ll shine mine on the minners,” he ordered. Danny was a little perplexed that the minnows were so concentrated but were also drifting with the current; it wasn’t typical behavior. They seemed a bit better coordinated than we had seen in fish before. We were not alarmed, mind you; we had seen all kinds of odd animal behavior in our careers, and we knew that something new was usually – quite literally – just around the next bend. Dan was just curious.
Danny threw his light beam into the middle of the disturbance. A few moments lapsed. “What on earth is that?” Danny asked, his whisper becoming a little frayed around the edges. I nervously held my light on the frog. I didn’t like the fact that Danny suddenly decided to use the term that instead of school of minners to describe our companion. A couple more lights swooped away from the frog and onto the thing.
Doug’s concerned voice came from the black, “What are those white things flippin’ around it?”
I could stand it no more and added my light’s beam to the search, leaving the frog in the dark. There was no escape splash that usually accompanied removing a light from a frog’s eyes. This guy was intent on the show.
My light fell on one of the most bizarre scenes I had ever witnessed. Less than ten feet away and drifting uncomfortably fast directly toward the center of our little group, the five lights illuminated hundreds of small, alternately white and then dark objects, no longer or wider than my thumb and often narrowed to a point. The thing, probably a little larger than a basketball, was flipping, rolling, and twisting. The brown soupy creek water kept us from making out the source of these objects but they seemed to be all attached into one mass. Frozen by the bizarre scene, too curious to move, we could only gawk as it rolled and flipped towards us.
When the object was perhaps four feet away from Phil, I noticed something, “The big things look like they have little eyes on ‘em. Look how they glow, sorta like snake eyes.” At that exact moment the water cleared, and our five lights illuminated a basketball shape floating just under the water. But it was not a basketball, pile of weeds or debris – this was a basketball-sized ball of snakes. And they were floating directly towards Phil’s crotch.
All people have their own unique way of showing fear, but this night we all used the same general method: we screamed like babies, swore in the way we would each have to beg forgiveness for later, and then clambered and splashed back to shore like a heard of hysterical wildebeests being chased by a 20-foot long crocodile – you know, the ones you see on those nature shows.
But for a brief moment, it was Phil that was the wildebeest that appeared to succumb to the gaping jaws of the monster. His scream fell to muffled silence as his feet tripped over a submerged log and his head slipped into the murky brine. I can only imagine what must have run through his mind as he treaded water in wild-eyed panic with that ball of snakes closing on his head. But somehow, as we sometimes see in the nature shows where the wildebeest literally escapes the jaws of death, so Phil escaped the ball of snakes and stumbled to the shore with the rest of us.
For the next few minutes, we gaped at the weird display of mating snakes, as they lustfully floated along their slow course to the sluggish rapid, undisturbed by the frantic splashing just moments before, and drifted happily out of sight.
Finally, the silence was broken by tentative, relieved laughter. Mike chuckled at Phil, “Man! I thought ya were a goner Phil. Phil?” There was no Phil.
We yelled for Phil, but he didn’t answer. We had seen him come out of the water – why we were laughing. Given Phil’s high-strung nature, we figured that he had not stopped running when he made shore. And that is exactly what happened. He confessed later, when we found him at the car, that he was so terrified that he had run as hard as he could all the way back to the car – at least a mile.
Realizing this was probably the case, we reluctantly turned to go back to the car in search of our comrade. Before leaving the scene of the incident, I thought to throw my light beam to the opposite shore. Yeah, there sat our frog, and it even looked as though he had a smirk on his face. But to top it all, he had a little buddy sitting beside him – I suspect it was his neophyte.
I was a little embarrassed for both Phil and me, but I still kept him as my apprentice. He turned out to be an excellent hunter and a fair-to-middlin’ fisherman. But he never went froggin again, and every time it was suggested, he slowly shook his head from side to side, glared through us back into that night of the snake ball, and uttered under his breath, “idiots.”
We later surmised that the snakes would have done us no harm – they probably didn’t have a clue we were even there, being busy with other things. Still, that little bump that we often felt when submerged up to our chins in a dead-still pothole and had tried to ignore, suddenly held new meaning and caused us to pause and ponder just a few moments longer than it had before the night of the snake ball.
Standard Slag was a rock quarry just off route 23. Years of rock mining created two huge craters. A small creek that ran through the craters was dammed and before long, the two craters became small lakes. The owner was a bass fisherman and so stocked the lake with a good supply of largemouth bass. Danny’s neighbor had connections with the owner and secured permission for us to fish the lakes.
Many summer evenings found Danny and me tossing lures into the lakes from his 12-foot aluminum boat. Although we caught several bass during these daylight ventures, none were anything to brag about, the biggest being perhaps a pound, maybe a touch more. Still, it was fun to catch a handful of the critters on a lazy afternoon after work.
One evening after fishing, we were strapping the boat to the top of Dan’s VW bug to go home when a worker at the quarry wandered by. “If ya can git that boat down heah at night and fish out in that lake, ya gonna catch ya some big fish,” he instructed us.
It didn’t take much coaxing to get us to try new adventures in those days, so the next Saturday evening found Danny and me dragging his twelve-foot aluminum boat with trolling motor and 12-volt battery down the side of the gravel embankment to the lake. Armed with new fishing lures that Danny’s friend from work had told him worked great at night, a strong flash light, trolling motor, charged up 12-volt battery, Dan’s squished thermos full of coffee, pop, moon pies and sandwiches, we pushed our craft into the evening.
Night settled in and we caught a few fish about the same size we had always caught. About 12:00 AM Danny hauled back on yet another bite, but this time the thing at the other end hauled back. Danny’s eyes widened in the darkness to two great beams of excitement, he yelled, “fish on!” and the battle was joined. For the next 15 minutes Danny fought a five-pound largemouth bass that jumped, dove, twisted and darted all over that lake, dragging our little craft behind it. For most of the battle all we could see through the blackness of the night was the occasional silver flash of its sides or belly reflecting in our light or a drenching spray of water after an explosive leap. It was downright exciting and even eerie.
After hauling the huge fish from the black water, Danny held it up. I shined the light on my brother and his trophy. He was grinning like a madman, and we were both shaking with delight. For the reminder of the night we fished, enjoying the company of several small bass, another five-pounder, the moon and stars, lightning bugs, and the friendly drone of bullfrogs serenading us from the shoreline.
For several years we night-fished Standard Slag. It never occurred to us to gig the frogs that abounded there; we were there for fishin’, not froggin. One night, while I was retrieving a lure from a tree on the shoreline – we caught far more trees, rocks and shrubs, given we couldn’t see where we were casting our lines – Danny happened to flash his light along the bank. “Rod, look at the size of that bullfrog,” he whispered at me.
What’s this? My brother in hunter mode? I unwrapped my fishing line from the tree, eyeballed a snake that was leering at me from the next branch over, and quickly pushed the boat back into the lake.
“Easy! Not so fast. Look at that frog just sittin’ there. He’s huge.” Danny squawked at me.
“So, we don’t have a gig. Let’s fish.” I had seen too many frogs to get all riled up about this one, especially since we didn’t have a gig.
“Here, drive the boat. Ease me up to that frog,” Danny ordered.
“What are ya gonna do? Catch him with your hands?” I snorted at my brother, knowing he would rather battle an ornery sow pig – something he had actually done – than touch a frog bare-handed.
Danny grabbed the fish net as he passed me in the boat. “I’m gonna net’im.”
I immediately understood my brother’s intent. I took my place at the trolling motor, held my light on the frog and eased the boat towards the critter, Danny giving me directions the entire time. “Easy. Just a little more. Tak’er easy.” My brother was leaning over the bow of the boat with his upper body stretched well out over the water. With his legs wrapped around the front seat for support, he signaled directions to me with one hand while wielding the net in the frog’s direction with the other. From my position at the stern, I could see my – theoretically – smarter sibling’s legs wrapped around the seat, his butt sticking up into the night sky, arms gesticulating at the frog and me, and the frog calmly watching the drama unfold. If I had not been so used to seeing Danny in stupidly comical positions from all our other exploits, I am quite sure I would have lost control of the boat from a hysterical fit of laughter. But I had become so immune to our accumulated antics over the years that the humor in the situation was lost to me until some 30 years later during the writing of this story.
After a few moments, the boat gently sliced through some waterweeds and lily pads to the edge of the shore where the frog was waiting. I could barely see the animal and had to lean over the side of the boat to keep my light on him. When Danny was about two feet from the frog it jumped straight towards the lake, and right into Danny’s outstretched net. A commotion ensued and the boat leaned and yawed crazily as Danny gyrated to gather his balance to remain in the boat. He then reeled himself back into the boat and swung his beaming face and net towards me. Rolling and twisting at the bottom of the net was a very angry 16-inch-long bullfrog.
“Now that’s pretty cool,” I stroked my brother’s ego. But in the same breath I asked, “So what are ya gonna do with ‘im? We don’t have a bag.”
Without a word, Danny rummaged around in his tackle box for an empty fish stringer and pushed it and the net with the dancing frog at me. “Here, put it on the stringer,” he ordered as if knitting a frog on a stringer was something I did on a daily basis.
“What? How? I can’t put that frog on that stringer?” I protested.
“Just stick one of the hooks through its lip the way we do the fish,” Danny instructed. Actually, that was not a bad idea. There was no doubt about it; Danny was the thinker and I had been relegated to the role of doer. – Hmm…sort of the way it is today with your grandmother and me.
By this time in our froggin career my role as frog handler had been firmly established so, quickly and without ceremony, I reached into the net and pulled out the frog. Danny opened one of the hooks on the stringer, I pierced the frog’s lower lip with it and closed the hook. Done. Except for a little gurgling protest and a requisite twitch or two – you would twitch and gurgle too, I bet – the frog didn’t seem to mind. We tied the stringer to the boat and tossed our prey over the side to rest in the water.
Since the fish had decided to take the night off, we put our rods and reels to the side and took up our lights and net; we went frog nettin’. As I recall, we netted about ten keeper frogs that night. Near morning, we took up our fishing gear once again and caught some small bass just perfect for the frying pan. The next afternoon we enjoyed a mess of bass, frog legs, homemade fries and a Mason jar of Coke.
Although there were fewer frogs serenading us on our nightly fishing trips the rest of that summer, we noticed the following summer that the choir was once again at full voice. On occasion Dan would ask, “Want some frogs with those fish and fries?”
I would grin and hand him the net, “Let’s do some frog nettin.”
Before we had watched the PBS specials on the behavior of bullfrogs or read about it in National Geographic, Danny and I often wondered just what the beasts ate. We both reminisced fondly how in the cartoons we had watched in our youth a smiling frog would detect a fly zooming around its head and then zap the fly out of the air with its long tongue – zzzzzz – zinggg, toin! Gulp! We surmised, based on this research, that frogs ate insects. And in fact, they do eat insects. But as we learned one night – and later watching PBS and reading National Geographic – they don’t stop there.
One dark night in southern Ohio… “Rod, look over here. There’s a snake on the bank,” Danny announced.
“Well good! Why don’t ya wait ‘n’ tell me that when I’m not in the water!” I grunted back at my brother. One of the last things I wanted to hear when half submerged up to my crotch in a pothole of pasture runoff water was that a snake was on the bank fewer than ten feet away. And worse, for some bizarre reason, it held my brother’s attention.
“It’s okay. Somethin’s wrong with ‘im,” Danny answered, sounding more interested in a snake than I had ever heard him before – except perhaps when he had accidentally stepped into a pit of vipers on one of our spring mushroom hunts. He had shown particular interest in snakes that day, apparent from his child-like screaming and crazy-legged dancing.
I waded to the bank to observe Dan’s snake. The snake was only a little larger than most of the water snakes we had to put up with when froggin. It had the same brown, gray and white markings, as did all its kind. It appeared healthy except for a large lump that extended its sides an inch or two on each side of its body which gave it reason to pause, and us reason to take notice.
“Is that a rock in its belly? Is it just sick and getting’ ready to explode or something’?” I pondered aloud.
Dan, being smarter than I – at least on this occasion – answered his younger, stupider brother, “No, look, it has the shape of a frog. That snake ate a frog. Looks like it’s a good-sized one too.”
“Well I’ll be. You’re right.” Having a few years of froggin under my belt, I had handled enough frogs and the occasional snake, to know that this snake couldn’t hurt me. I clamped my left hand down over the snake’s head and lifted his body with the right hand just under the big lump. Danny took a step backwards, perhaps concerned that I would toss the snake on him, but I knew better than that; Danny was getting old – nearly 30 – and I didn’t want him to have a heart attack.
I felt around on the snake’s belly and, sure enough, I could feel a bullfrog in there. After a few moments even Danny felt compelled to explore the belly. It was, in fact, rather amazing to us. “Well, now we know what eats bull frogs,” Danny said. “I wonder what bullfrogs eat?”
“Well, bullfrogs just eat bugs,” I answered, recalling the cartoons. Danny nodded in agreement. It wouldn’t be long until we found that I was wrong, even without the benefit of PBS or National Geographic. I set the snake down and the three of us went our own ways, perhaps to meet again someday.
On a subsequent froggin trip Danny and I came across a nice bullfrog and successfully gigged him. He was not a particularly large frog, probably 16 or 17 inches when stretched out, certainly big enough to eat. When we gigged him, the gig’s prongs went all the way through him and came out on the other side. We noticed something hooked to the point of the gig and stretched back into the frog’s belly. “What on earth is that?” Danny asked. Of course, because he was an unapologetic wimp, he ordered me to investigate.
Being a seasoned frog-puller-off-the-gig guy, I figured I had seen it all and that it was nothing more than a piece of frog gut, and had no qualms about picking the frog up and investigating. “Well, I’ll be darned,” I announced as I recognized the telltale marking of a water snake. “That’s the remains of a snake, Dan.”
Danny put the gig down and came over to its business end to join the frog and me. We examined the nearly digested snake. Little more than its skin remained. We pulled it the rest of the way out of the frog and it was indeed about the same length as the frog. “Well, I be darned,” Danny observed. “I guess we now know what frogs eat.”
“Yep, pretty cool,” I answered and then unceremoniously pulled the frog off the gig and tossed him into the burlap bag to join his buddies.
After some investigation on the internet (many years later) and subsequent viewings of PBS, it turns out that bullfrogs eat crayfish, other frogs, minnows, and even small snakes and young birds. They are pretty darned aggressive animals, and their neighbors better think twice before venturing into a bullfrog’s back yard.
I have more stories about froggin, and I guess I should write them down someday. But the stories above give you the gist of the matter.