I almost smashed the frog when I fell. I'd been telling Chris about when I was at summer camp as a kid and we'd go on this hike up a big hill to the water tower, and there were always all kinds of frogs around where it leaked, and I would always get left behind because I was trying to catch the frogs and my group would hike on. I told the story because I'd been trying to catch a lizard, who evaded me more than once by running straight at me, across my hands, and to the next rock. I nearly fell off the edge of the waterfall trying to chase one around a juniper, and that one got away as well. Eventually I gave up and ate some more dried bananas. A boulder had apparently been calling to Chris, so he got up to go walk on it as it required.



"Hey, speaking of frogs!"



So of course I lept up to catch the frog, tried to run up the boulder, and fell. The frog jumped out from under my hand just before I hit the granite. Apparently the whole thing was quite poetic.


We sat around in the sun like poikilotherms for a while longer, and eventually I did catch a little treefrog, whose tiny heart beat coolly against my fingers as she sat cupped in my hands. When I set her back in the stream, we saw the yellow stripes under her legs when she swam away.


He wrote about it better.