The Frog and the Snake

That frog was really big. It was bigger than the largest i had ever seen. The frog stared back at me with expressionless eyes. It was almost the size of a football. There is no problem for a frog to be the size of a foot ball, but it will be a bit disheartening for a football to be the the size of a frog, and that is exactly the problem here.

I just thought about the craziness of nature. The same nature that created the frog and the football ended up making a mistake- forgot to put a difference in size between the two things. I know i am nobody to pull up the mistake of something as great and mighty as the nature himself, but could not help it. Ok, where were we? The frog.

With designs on the skin that resembled the hair of an unbathed lady, the frog made a sound. As some wise people say, the line of demarcation between ‘noise’ and ‘sound’ is not very thin. The frog made full use of that, leaving me confused.

As a student of biology, I was made to attend many classes on zoology. I remember one of those classes where little me, the poor thing, was sitting in the front row of the classroom and listening to what the teacher says, with sleepy ears (Usually, people say sleepy eyes. The revolutionary in me does not allow me to say that. If eyes can get sleepy, why not ears? After all, they are separated by not more than four fingers distance. ) The teacher was trying to explain how the male frog made some sound (okay, you take it noise) to call the female for whatever reasons you are aware of. I just imagined how it would be like in humans, if the males were required to make some sound to call the females. It would be a funny scene to watch well-dressed and educated people making crazy sounds.

So the frog was also not a very bad performer when it came to making sounds, and he nearly succeeded in making the world around him know his presence felt, when the villain of the story came in to the scene.  

The snake was so peculiar in the fact that it was like any other snake. He had that long bifid tongue that he pulled in and out whenever he liked; he had those typical body movements that can scare any ophidiophobic person like me to death; he had that slippery sort of skin that would add to the fear, etc. I don’t know if he had seen me or not, but like me, he was also more interested in the frog sitting ahead. He straight away started moving towards the frog without even glancing in my direction. If I would have been somebody else, I would have immediately cried on the spot as he did not give me the attention I was worthy off. I agree with the fact that somebody disregarding you is a painful state of affairs, but I am not somebody who would waste such a valuable thing as tears for something like this.

There is a group of people who say sixth sense exists. Sometimes, you will face scenarios that make you a member of that group and I would say this is exactly one such scenario. I trust in my ears’ ability to cover sounds of 20 to 20K Hz range, and I also believe in my eyes when I am not seeing anything unusual. The snake was really careful in not making any sound (like thieves during theft) and it was approaching the frog from behind. I remember my biology teacher not telling me frogs have got eyes at the back. But the frog in the story sensed the presence of snake at his back and immediately jumped away. Sixth sense in action! If it would have been a football (as I said it has got all the qualities to be called one) I would have said: “Good shot!” Since it is (only) a frog, I had to say “Wow! What a jump that was!”  It was followed by some more wow! Jumps and the frog was no more (not what you understood, no more in the scene). 

This left a disappointed snake with me. Poor fellow. He has done whatever he could do, but still… I know it is a bit of over expectation from his part when he thought he could eat that big a frog in one go. If he wanted, I was here to help. It was his foolishness as he did not consider me at all. Now, the snake too left the scene sad, hungry, and disappointed. He lost his dinner. How heart breaking a situation that is! May be he did not have anything else during the day. All his hopes of having food would have been on that single frog. I would say, it is not his mistake. Sometimes, the nature’s behaviour is so cruel. It does things like tsunami and earth quake, but depriving a snake of its dinner was a bit too much even for nature.

The snake’s sad eyes still remain in my memory. I think I saw some tears. Do snakes cry? I don’t know.