by Leah Hampton
“If no one has questions, we’ll move on to the nature walk.”
No one had questions. The naturalist seemed pleased. He pointed his flashlight upwards and began to stroll out of the clearing toward a heavily canopied path at the far end of the bio station’s courtyard. A few flashlights bounced off the small collection of buildings to their right—two labs, a rustic staff dormitory, and a small museum, all closed now. It was nearly nine; full dark loomed.
The naturalist turned at the last moment, just before entering the woods, and announced to his followers, “We may lose each other.”
The crowd paused for his next instruction.
“If that happens,” he continued, “all the research trails eventually end here”—he staked his beam at a patch of courtyard grass—“or at the parking area. Just make your way back to your vehicle. You all have your flashlights and your pictorial brochures, so please proceed quietly. Listen and watch to identify tonight’s featured species, and stay on the trail at all times.”
Carolyn and Frank found each other’s hands as they proceeded with the group into the woods. They each noted the coolness of the other’s skin, a surprise in the May darkness.
“Don’t lose me,” Carolyn squeaked.
Frank squeezed his sister’s fingers.
Twins. They were thirty-seven. Carolyn had gained weight since her divorce, and so had recently taken up hiking. Frank worked at the paper mill in town, the one the university activists called a scourge and kept trying to close. The one tourists complained about because of its industrial smells, its unsightly smokestack interrupting their mountain views.
Carolyn and Frank had lived in the mountains all their lives. They had moved in together after Carolyn’s divorce. Both were childless. Neither knew anything about local ecology.
The only time Frank went hiking was in the summer when Carolyn made him do it instead of tubing at Deep Creek, or when his ex-brother-in-law felt like hunting deer. Frank did not own a gun, but he thought his ex-brother-in-law was a better man than him, so he always tagged along when invited. He would borrow a rifle, chat to loud local boys about weather and ammunition. He never killed anything. Frank liked venison, but Carolyn wouldn’t cook it. “Because of Bambi,” she would say, pouting. Carolyn did not like Frank hanging out with her ex-husband.
Other than that, their relationship, their twinship, worked fine. It worked just fine.
Ahead of them, a family of four were whispering earnestly into a stack of wet rocks. Their youngest child had found a salamander.
The girl with the crooked braids breezed past and said, “Salamanders were last week. We’re not even in the real woods yet.”
Chastened, the family straightened themselves and continued walking.
The path soon enfolded itself into dense forest and carried Frank and Carolyn slowly higher. Trees and brush pulled closer into one another, as if the vegetation regarded the path as an inconvenient interruption in the mingled conversation of their leaves. Calls of animals awakening for nocturnal hunts buzzed in the distance, a distance that seemed nearer occasionally, when a lone squawk or rustle burst just out of flashlight range. In the purpling gloom, Carolyn paused and breathed.
“Earth,” said Carolyn with reverence. “It smells so earthy. Don’t you just love dirt?”
They carried on for a little while. The group’s flashlights made eerie pools of light around them—a man’s leg, glowing and pink, the chop of a harsh beam across black stone—but their lights could not reach far. Cool dark embraced each follower like a caul.
No one had any sense of time except for the passage of heavy purple into true blackness as they deepened into woods, evening, night. The naturalist led them along, far ahead, making no noise as he walked. He made no effort to interact with the group.
Occasionally someone asked a hushed question, but the naturalist did not always answer. Only if he approved of the question, only when the naturalist had something specific to explain, would he speak. He signaled the group that he was about to hold forth by pausing his loping gait and moving his head in a slow, graceful S pattern. This gesture held a certain portent that always silenced the group, even if they could not see him from where they stood.
Frank’s hands were fidgety tonight, and he reached for the brochure in his pocket. He curled the paper, turning it over and over until he had made a tight tube with the paper. He batted the tube against his fingers, making sharp, rapid thuds. The noise made him feel better somehow, less lost in the dark. Ahead, the naturalist stopped short, half turned, then quickly walked on, clearly perturbed at this unnatural sound. Someone shushed Frank, and the group continued following their leader. Frank stuffed the brochure tube back into his pocket and paused to let his unseen shusher pass by.
Frank stood perpendicular to the trail, his size thirteen feet spread wide, staring into the middle distance, shoulders slightly forward, mouth open. Carolyn approached him and peered closely at his posture in the darkness. He was a stocky man, and he wore an orange University of Tennessee T-shirt that did his round belly no favors. Frank rarely left the house without a baseball cap clamped onto his skull, and tonight he had selected one that advertised his favorite beer. The sporty, reflective polygons of his sunglasses rested on the brim. Carolyn watched him, watched him breathing in the dark, his goatee framing his round, open mouth.
“Are we rednecks?” she asked.
“What?” Frank turned his head. “No. We’re not hippies like these people”—Frank nodded to the group ahead of them on the trail—“but I’m no hick. Go on ahead now.”
Carolyn moved on while Frank took a moment to himself. Eventually he sucked in his gut and trudged to catch up with the group. The naturalist had paused to admonish everyone about shining their flashlights into the trees.
“Be selective. Discriminating,” he entreated them. “Our beams may frighten the frogs and make them go quiet. Madame, please extinguish your headlamp.”
Almost everyone switched off their lights, choosing to proceed blindly from then on. An approving trill floated to them from a clearing on their left—a long, high-pitched whirring that sounded like a spaceship from an old science fiction film.
“American toad,” a young man whispered beside Carolyn. “He’s late for breeding.”
The group marched on, unlit.
Carolyn paused by a large cedar and fumbled for her brochure. She squinted at it without light, then carefully cupped a hand around her flashlight so she could read about toads. Her hands glowed like a pink lantern under the evergreen.
Frank stopped with her and watched her frowning into the brochure. It was the same frown she had given her smudged canvas in the painting class she had taken last fall. Frank had dutifully taken the class with her, to support her efforts at self-improvement. When the frown deepened to a scowl, and Carolyn admitted defeat with watercolors, they both quit the class. Next for Carolyn there had been a quilting circle, which Frank had not joined. That lasted several weeks, until his sister discovered her backstitch was ragged and jaunty next to the even, tight lines sewn by the other quilters. She had showed Frank a sample swatch, the same rumpled frown pulling her features together like a dried plum. He followed the differing stitches with two fat fingers and offered to help his sister unpick her work. Now Carolyn was learning about Nature, so Frank was learning about Nature.
The title of tonight’s lecture-walk, “Know Your Frogs,” was backlit in flat block letters. The brochure also glowed in Carolyn’s cupped light, and its creamy paper warmed his sister’s face as she read.
“They breathe through their skin,” she said, chewing her bottom lip.
The trail eventually began to run parallel to a pond that emptied into a thin, susurrating creek. The children in the group noted the pond first and whispered to each other that now, now they might see something. Ahead, the naturalist stood off the main path, one foot lowered into the reeds of the pond at the point where the trail came nearest the water. He raised his left han
d to the group behind him, signaling for silence.
People grouped up slowly, edging toward him. Carolyn and Frank stood to his left in a half crouch. When the naturalist was satisfied he had enough followers around him, he turned his body sideways.
In the low tone of a priest blessing wafers, the naturalist nodded and said, “Eggs.”
The gathered uttered a collective sigh, and the naturalist switched on his flashlight and eased its beam waterwards to a spot beside Carolyn. Behind a rock that protected a small, still corner of water from the expanse of the pond, a fine tangle of slimy rope looped under itself in a bundle near the reeds. The rope was clear and glistening, with black beads of movement inserted at regular intervals. It was as if some absent grandmother had dropped her mourning jewelry or an onyx rosary in the water, and now the strand was writhing, coming alive.
The pressure of the crowd behind her, all those people craning their necks and contorting to see the egg sacs, made Carolyn unsteady on her feet. In a thudding, excruciating moment, her left foot slipped awkwardly into the water. She teetered and fell, and her thick left leg landed sharply amid the delicate necklace of embryos.
The crowd gasped. Frank reached for his sister’s arm and pulled her back quickly, firmly. She fumbled on her buttocks, then maneuvered her body into an awkward squat and finally stood. Frank held on to her as she tiptoed backward, away from the water. Her mortification was obvious; no one dared move.
Eventually an elderly female voice whispered, “Are you all right, dear?” and from somewhere in the darkness, someone offered another hand to steady her, a murmur of concern, a small towel. Ripples of water radiated out from where she had fallen, and here and there the splashes of creatures frightened off by the commotion broke the tense silence.
Carolyn nodded and shook her head, nodded again. She was unable to speak. She receded from the pond, back onto the trail, then across and off the trail again onto the other side, into the woods and up a small rise, finally coming to rest under a hemlock tree far from the group. Frank followed.
“Are you OK?”
Carolyn leaned her head back against the hemlock’s trunk, nodded once, and said nothing.
“You sure, sissy?” Frank touched her shoulder.
Carolyn put a hand up, shook her head, then put the hand to her lips.
“It’s all right,” said Frank. “Frog eggs are tough. They’ll be fine.”
Carolyn exhaled heavily. The hemlock was sprouting some growth in the late spring. In the darkness, the light green of these new needles looked white, like snow on the tips of each branch.
“My knee hurts,” she said finally.
In the distance, the naturalist dismissed the group briefly, and small subgroups formed along the banks, hoping to find more treasures. For the duration of this interlude, the naturalist kept to himself, off to the side of the pond.
“You sure you’re OK?”
“Yeah.” She pulled her voice tight to regain some dignity. “I’m going to rest my knee while everyone does this part.” Carolyn looked up at Frank. “It’s fine. Go look for frogs.”
Frank dropped his hands from her and walked back toward the pond. The night air chilled him, and he recognized the deep huuh of a bullfrog as its call vibrated up from the water. In the dark, he followed it like a beacon.
A few minutes later, he felt guilty and looked back. He could just make out the pale outline of his sister. Carolyn was now standing on the trail, and the naturalist stood over her, his thinness in sharp contrast to Carolyn’s round, vulnerable form. A stray flashlight wandered over them. The naturalist’s eyes were black, his pupils fully dilated in the dark. His voice was low and cold, but Frank could not hear what he was saying.
Frank advanced, clenching his fists, but the naturalist had finished with Carolyn and walked away. She stood frozen and hunched in the dark.
“What did he say?” Frank asked when he closed the distance.
“Nothing.”
“Was he being a dick?”
“No,” said Carolyn. She raised her head and inhaled. “It’s fine.”
“Bullfrog!” shouted one of the children from the salamander family.
Several people shushed the child, but most scurried toward him with flashlights and thrilled, suppressed giggles. Carolyn watched the activity and joined the rear of the group. She did not giggle, but she walked with a determined gait Frank knew well enough. He followed.
The salamander boy was showing everyone a large male bullfrog resting on a rock jutting out of the water. Carolyn and Frank, the whole group, marveled at its lumpy ease, its huge eyes. As if to impress his audience, the bullfrog belted out a large, slow, belching croak that rattled the air around them. Frank felt the croak rumble across his shins, felt the vibrations on the undersides of his arms, at the edges of his eyes. They had all seen bullfrogs before, surely, but not like this. Not at night, in the deep, high wild. Not so big. Not so special.
“It can’t see in front of itself,” whispered the salamander boy. “They have a blind spot right in the front of their nose.”
“Is that true?” someone asked.
No one answered. The gathered swarm leaned closer, trained more beams on their new celebrity.
The bullfrog licked its left eyeball. It lingered for a moment, bored or terrified, then eventually waddled away. Its front fingers grasped at the rocks and moss with deft, perfect certainty. Once he was gone, the group breathed together and mumbled approbation at what a fine specimen he’d been, what a loud, majestic croak he had. They had all seen him; the night was a success.
The naturalist loomed at the edge of all this activity. People uncrouched themselves and started back onto the path. Once they had reassembled, the naturalist made a brief speech about their fortune. He repeated some of his earlier statements about declining populations. “There are simply fewer specimens at this elevation now,” he concluded, then waved his hand to move the group onward, back into the woods, away from the water.
“But what is happening?” asked a small woman with prematurely gray hair and muscular arms. “Why are they disappearing?”
The naturalist shrugged.
“Soil, perhaps. Frogs don’t like acidity. We pollute. We rain it down. Acid gets in everything, even all the way up here. In the earth.” The naturalist swooped one of his bat arms over the ground. “They leave; they stop breeding. It’s difficult to say.”
The little girl with the crooked braids started to cry. She had missed her chance to take a picture of the bullfrog, and she was concerned about the world ending and never getting to see another one. Someone, her father perhaps, tugged on her braids to console her.
The naturalist was off again. As everyone began to follow, Frank held on to Carolyn’s elbow and maneuvered her past the group to the far side of the trail. He sat her down on a felled trunk and reached for her knee.
“Let me rub it,” he said.
Carolyn did not respond. Frank stood both their flashlights on the ground in front of them, their beams shooting upward into the canopy and the night, so that for a little while, as they sat together alone, things did not seem so dark.
After a pause, Carolyn asked Frank, “Am I a good person?”
Frank was massaging his sister’s knee in quick, awkward squeezes. “Of course you are. What in the world do you mean?”
“Nothing,” said Carolyn. She pulled her leg slowly from Frank’s hands. “Nothing.”
“Why don’t we go back,” said Frank. “They’ll be way ahead by now.”
Carolyn sighed and allowed herself to follow Frank. He held both flashlights until they found their way to the group, then he handed one to Carolyn.
Back once again in the forest, away from the water, the naturalist was now standing with one foot on a large rock. Their group seemed smaller now, though Frank did not know whether that was right, or when or where they had lost members. He only noted the smell of ginger bug juice was not as strong as it had been before, and there seemed t
o be more air between everyone.
As Carolyn and Frank approached, the naturalist described the acreage of the station, how far the grounds stretched.
“It’s not just this particular area. There are miles of national park all around us, in every direction. We work to keep everything hospitable, even for species we don’t study. Sometimes the woods and the station seem as if they are all one. We have no fence. Crossover, cross-pollination.”
He bent down to the boy who had found the bullfrog and salamander. “Lots of unwelcome visitors. Bumps in the night.” The boy bent his knees, and his head shrank into his shoulders. Then the naturalist turned his back on the group and started to walk away.
“Are there … bears?” one of the other children asked.
“Oh, yes,” the naturalist said without turning around. He waved his hand slowly in no specific direction, as if to indicate the ubiquitous presence of bears, the constant, unrelenting bearness of the place, and he glided into the black.
Carolyn huffed a sharp breath as she watched the naturalist recede.
“He keeps doing that,” she whispered, mostly to herself.
“What?” asked Frank.
“He keeps leaving us,” she said. “Some of us can’t keep up with him. It’s not right.” She tightened her lips. “There are children.”
Carolyn bent slightly and rubbed her knee. The rest of the group wandered after the naturalist, abiding his pull. The followers walked from a variety of directions toward him in a slow, inexorable creep.
Frank and Carolyn stood beside a large rhododendron bush just coming into bloom. Frank lingered there, staring at its fat buds and the round explosions of massive pink clusters holding themselves out, so brazenly, in the dark. He waved his hands around the flowers, along the waxy leaves, trying not to touch, touching. The petals felt like feathers against his palm.
Carolyn had carried on ahead. He caught up and soon found her at a wide spot in the trail. The starlight was brighter here, and the trail forked in a definite high- or low-road pattern. Just above them they could hear the rustle of the group on the high trail. Carolyn’s moon-white legs, arms, her white T-shirted body, glowed before her brother. She was looking down a long, slow switchback that followed the left fork. All was quiet here.