Tadpoles in a Jar

Part One · Black Dots

It rained for a whole week in April. When the sun came back, there was a wide puddle in the low corner of the field. Milo went to look at it in his boots. At the edge, in the shallow water, was a lump of clear jelly full of black dots.

His big sister Ivy came down to see. "Frog eggs," said Ivy. "Each dot turns into a tadpole, and each tadpole turns into a frog." Milo did not believe it, because the dots looked like black seeds, and they did not look like anything that could ever hop.

Milo got a big glass jar from the shed. He scooped up some of the jelly with a cup, and he added puddle water and a few green weeds. Then he set the jar on the shelf by his window. Every morning he looked at it before he got dressed.

On the fourth day, the dots began to wiggle. On the sixth day, they were out of the jelly. Now they were tadpoles, little black specks with tails. They hung on the weeds and did not do much. Milo counted them twice, and both times he got ten.

Ivy told him that a tadpole breathes water, the way a fish does. It eats the thin green slime that grows on the weeds. Milo dropped in a bit of lettuce, too, and they ate that. They grew fat and round. When the water turned cloudy, he changed it, slow and careful.

Then the sun came out and stayed out. Every day the puddle in the field got smaller. The water went from wide to small to just a ring of mud. And in that ring were hundreds of tadpoles, all crowded in together. There was not much time left for them.

Milo did not stop to think, and he did not wait to ask. He got the bucket from the shed, and Ivy got a cup. They scooped the puddle until it was only mud. The pond was at the bottom of the hill, past the hedge. It took six trips, and the bucket was heavy.

Part Two · Back Legs First

Back in his room, the ten tadpoles in the jar had news. Two small bumps had grown at the base of each tail. By the next week, the bumps were back legs. The tadpoles kicked them the way a swimmer does. Back legs first, Ivy said, and front legs after that.

Milo wanted to see it all, and he wanted to see the front legs come. He wanted to see the tails get short and then be gone. Most of all, he wanted to see the first hop. So he kept the jar on the shelf, and he changed the water, and he waited.

The front legs came in May. The tails got shorter every day, as if they were being pulled back in. One morning, the smallest one had climbed a weed stem. It sat at the very top with its head out of the water, taking in air. It did not want to swim anymore.

The jar was too small for a frog. A frog needs a bank to climb out on, and mud to hide in, and bugs to eat. The shelf by the window got hot by noon. Milo knew all of that. He also knew that he did not want to let them go.

He looked at the small one on the weed stem for a long time. Then he picked up the jar and carried it down the hill. At the edge of the pond, he tipped it slowly on its side. Ten tiny frogs with tiny tails swam out into the reeds. Milo did not say anything.

On a warm night in June, Milo went down to the pond with Ivy. The air was full of croaking, like a hundred tiny doors that needed oil. A frog no bigger than his thumb hopped onto his boot.

It sat there for one breath, and then it was gone. Milo did not know if it was one of his ten. There was no way to tell, so he decided that it was. And then he and Ivy sat in the grass and listened to all the tiny doors.