Their call is like a cricket's trill and they go at it with astonishing gusto. It's a mating cry, of course, the male frogs announcing to the females, boasting, luring them in. And doing so from afar. The frogs are smaller than my thumb and they're perhaps 80 metres up the valley but their trill reaches me undiminished.
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They're vaguely comic, frogs: their slow, wide-footed crawl; their great broad grin; their necklessness; the throats that they inflate to boom their calling out; their sudden hops; their amphibiousness, neither of the water or of the land; and their bulging pop-up eyes like the headlights on old Citroens.
I've eaten frogs. In France, inevitably, though they're popular in other European countries and in Asia. In China, frog is known as field chicken.
It's the thighs you eat, les cuisses, the muscles enlarged by all that jumping. The French cook them in butter, garlic and parsley. Cook anything in butter, garlic and parsley and it's good. As I remember it, the flesh of frog was bland and white and there was very little of it.
But I got far greater pleasure, years before, from frogspawn. When I was a kid the ponds grew thick with it in spring, an abundant mass of squishy, vaguely sticky strings of pearls. We gathered it up in jars and buckets and lugged it home to watch the miracle happen over days and weeks.
The dot in the heart of each egg would swell and wriggle and hatch and all of a sudden what had been a string of pearls was a shoal of swimming commas, each a black blob with a tail, a tiny scrap of new-made life, of flesh, a thing unique unto itself and utterly unfroglike.
But then, by who knew what unfathomable process, the comma sprouted legs, fore legs, back legs, and its front end fattened and it tail shrank to nothing and then, more often that not, it died, because in becoming a frog its gills withered and it grew lungs so it needed to get out of the bucket and onto the land to breathe the air. But the deaths didn't matter. The world was impossibly rich with frogs and spawn, always infinitely more than we could ruin. There would always be frogs.
But that was then and this is now. Today, frogs are a blinking light on extinction's dashboard. That skin of theirs is a membrane. It makes them vulnerable to viruses, to pollution. Around the world they are becoming fewer, rarer. The nights are quieter. And all because of us.
So it's good to sit and hear them while we can, to hear them filling the night air with lust. Unseen I raised a glass of vodka to them last night then went inside because I was cold and left them to their trilling. Odd creatures; lovely creatures.
