During our summer acquaintance with her, when we see her oftenest, a
valued inhabitant of our garden and a welcome twilight visitor at our
threshold, we associate silence with the toad, almost as intimately as
with the proverbially silent clam. In the drouthy or too moist summer
days and evenings, she never awakens our hopes or fears with shrill
prophecies of rain as does her nimbler and more aspiring cousin, the
tree-toad.
A rustle of the cucumber leaves that embower her cool retreat, the spat
and shuffle of her short, awkward leaps, are the only sounds that then
betoken her presence, and we listen in vain for even a smack of pleasure
or audible expression of self-approval, when, after a nervous,
gratulatory wriggle of her hinder toes, she dips forward and, with a
lightning-like out-flashing of her unerring tongue, she flicks into her
jaws a fly or bug. She only winks contentedly to express complete
satisfaction at her performance and its result.
Though summer's torrid heat cannot warm her to any voice, springtime and
love make her tuneful, and every one hears the softly trilled,
monotonous song jarring the mild air, but few know who is the singer.
The drumming grouse is not shyer of exhibiting his performance.
From a sun-warmed pool not fifty yards away a full chorus of the rapidly
vibrant voices arises, and you imagine that the performers are so
absorbed with their music that you may easily draw near and observe
them. But when you come to the edge of the pool you see only a
half-dozen concentric circles of wavelets, widening from central points,
where as many musicians have modestly withdrawn beneath the transparent
curtain.
Wait, silent and motionless, and they will reappear. A brown head is
thrust above the surface, and presently your last summer's familiar of
the garden and doorstep crawls slowly out upon a barren islet of
cobble-stone, and, assured that no intruder is within the precincts
sacred to the wooing of the toads, she inflates her throat and tunes up
her long, monotonous chant. Ere it ceases, another and another take it
up, and from distant pools you hear it answered, till all the air is
softly shaken as if with the clear chiming of a hundred swift-struck,
tiny bells. They ring in the returning birds, robin, sparrow, finch and
meadow lark, and the first flowers, squirrelcup, arbutus, bloodroot,
adder-tongue and moose-flower.
When the bobolink has come to his northern domain again and the oriole
flashes through the budding elms and the first columbine droops over the
gray ledges, you may still hear an occasional ringing of the toads, but
a little later the dignified and matronly female, having lost her voice
altogether, has returned to her summer home, while her little mate has
exchanged his trill for a disagreeable and uncanny squawk, perhaps a
challenge to his rivals, who linger about the scenes of their courtship
and make night hideous until midsummer. Then a long silence falls on the
race of toads--a silence which even hibernation scarcely deepens.