Wild Life Near Home

by Dallas Lore Sharp

We need no "second sight," no pipe of Pan, no hills of Latmos with a flock to feed, to find ourselves back in that enchanted world of the kelpies and satyrs. All we need to do is to use the eyes and ears we have, and haunt our hills by morning and by moonlight. Here in the moonlight around the old pump I saw goblins, if ever goblins were seen in the light of our moon.

There was not a croak, not a squeak, not the slightest sound, save the small pit-pat, pit-pat, made by their hopping. There may have been some kind of toad talk among them, but listen never so closely, I could not catch a syllable of it.

Where did they all come from? How did they find their way to this wet spot over the hills and across the acres of this wide pasture? You could walk over the field in the daytime and have difficulty in finding a single toad; but here at night, as I lay watching, every few minutes one would hop past me in the grass; or coming down the narrow cow-paths in the faint light I could see a wee black bunch bobbing leisurely along with a hop and a stop, moving slowly toward the pump to join the band of his silent friends under the trough.

Not because there was more food at the pump, nor for the joy of gossip, did the toads meet here. The one thing necessary to their existence is water, and doubtless many of these toads had crossed this pasture of fifteen acres simply to get a drink. I have known a toad to live a year without food, and another to die in three days for lack of water. And yet this thirsty little beast never knows the pleasure of a real drink, because he does not know how to drink.

I have kept toads confined in cages for weeks at a time, never allowing them water when I could not watch them closely, and I never saw one drink. Instead, they would sprawl out in the saucer on their big, expansive bellies, and soak themselves full, as they did here on the damp sand about the pump.

Just after sunset, when the fireflies light up and the crickets and katydids begin to chirp, the toad that sleeps under my front step hops out of bed, kicks the sand off his back, and takes a long look at the weather. He seems to think as he sits here on the gravel walk, sober and still, with his face turned skyward. What does he think about? Is he listening to the chorus of the crickets, to the whippoorwills, or is it for supper he is planning? It may be of the vicissitudes of toad life, and of the mutability of all sublunary things, that he meditates. Who knows? Some day perhaps we shall have a batrachian psychology, and I shall understand what it is that my door-step lodger turns over and over in his mind as he watches the coming of the stars. All I can do now is to minute his cogitations, and I remember one evening when he sat thinking and winking a full hour without making a single hop.

As the darkness comes down he makes off for a night of bug-hunting. At the first peep of dawn, bulging plump at the sides, he turns back for home. Home to a toad usually means any place that offers sleep and safety for the day; but if undisturbed, like the one under the step, he will return to the same spot throughout the summer. This chosen spot may be the door-step, the cracks between the bricks of a well, or the dense leaves of a strawberry-bed.

In the spring of 1899 so very little rain fell between March and June that I had to water my cucumber-hills. There was scarcely a morning during this dry spell that I did not find several toads tucked away for the day in these moist hills. These individuals had no regular home, like the one under the step, but hunted up the coolest, shadiest places in the soft soil and made new beds for themselves every morning.

Their bed-making is very funny, but not likely to meet the approval of the housewife. Wearied with the night's hunting, a toad comes to the cool cucumber-vines and proceeds at once to kick himself into bed. He backs and kicks and elbows into the loose sand as far as he can, then screws and twists till he is worked out of sight beneath the soil, hind end foremost. Here he lies, with only his big pop-eyes sticking out, half asleep, half awake. If a hungry adder crawls along, he simply pulls in his eyes, the loose sand falls over them, and the snake passes on.