Mama
and the
Tar-baby
Toad |
 |
Silently casting soft beams of light onto the dark waters of Orchid Pond, the orange disk of a golden moon bore witness to the culmination of another metamorphosis between life in water and in the air.
The surface of the water parted to reveal the triangular, spade-shaped head of an emerging infant toad. The small, jet-black head was shiny in the moonlight, showing no hint of mouth nor eyes though they were present, their outlines camouflaged by the dark smoothness of the amphibian's wet skin.
As if tired, it climbed laborously out of its previous element, and into the moist night air of Orchid Pond. Although it did not realize the fact, the three-hundred-odd, tar-black bodies crowding the moss and grasses beyond the bank were those of its brothers and sisters. An ebony multitude teemed in the orchid-scented moonlight, as appetites and muscles were warming up in preparation for a banquet orchestrated by nature.
The tar-baby toads, all three hundred or so of them, had been deposited in the waters of the pond in the form of fertilized eggs by a single female toad. Enormous in comparison to her offspring, her round, mottled, greenish-black body had meticulously wound, in yards-long strands, thread-like ribbons of life-bearing eggs, amongst the upright leaves and stems of water plants in the pond. The eggs were clearly visible in the interior of the jelly-ribbon; each had a tiny, black speck in its center, and each speck was the beginnings of a tar-baby toad. These resulting baby toads were from her third such deposit.
The toad and his siblings had come into existence waving languidly in the oxygen-laden current, entwined amongst the fronds of the water plants. They were clearly visible as miniature tadpole embryos inside the eggs within a week after being laid, and moved in their clear, transparent cubicles with jerking strokes of their muscular tails. After a time, they had hatched as tiny, round tadpoles, each as black as midnight, and each with an appetite to keep it busy and fat and sleek, as befitted a jet-stone of life.
Carpeting the fertile lake of mud around the shallows of the pond, the tar-baby tadpoles had dined elaborately on the smorgasboard of succulent life available there. Their ebony- black bodies formed an asphalt turf, a wriggling, moving cloud on the bottom of the shallows of their perfect habitat.
In a few months the round, inky bodies would sprout two short, muscular back legs, and the tails would begin to shorten, being slowly absorbed as nourishment into the bodies of the would-be toads.
Front legs would soon sprout, the tail would disappear, and the tar-baby toads would emerge from the sleeping waters to glisten, this night, in the moonlight on the edge of Orchid Pond.
As the newly emerged tar-baby toad sat, breathing its first fresh gulps of air, a long, muscular member snaked lightning-fast toward him. It struck him with a resinous slap, and a thick mucous bound him tightly to the strong, spatulate member.
Healthy muscles contracted, and the mighty jaws of his uncomprehending mother closed around him in sudden darkness. She gulped, her bulging eyes disappeared into her skull with the movement of her swallow, and the baby toad joined twenty-six of his brothers and sisters in his own mother's belly, to perhaps become the source of black energy for the next generation of tar-baby tadpoles to find cool beginnings in the waters of Orchid Pond.
The eyes of the adult toad reappeared, fixing on another of her unwary progeny.
(c) 1993 Carson Clippard