The Frog the Traveller (Vsevolod
M. Garshin)
Once upon a time there
lived a Frog. She lived in a swamp, caught midges and mosquitoes, and in spring
croaked loudly together with all the other frogs. She would have lived there
happily till the end of her days-if a stork did not eat her up, of course - but
something happened one day which upset all her life.
She was squatting on a
snag that stuck out of water, enjoying the warm drizzle. "What a lovely,
wet day! How wonderful to be alive!" she was thinking.
The rain fell on her
spotted, shiny back; the drops trickled under her tummy and behind her legs,
and it was so pleasant that she all but croaked from delight, but fortunately
remembered in time that this was autumn and frogs do not croak in autumn-spring
is the season for croaking. So she bit back the croak, and went on enjoying
herself in silence.
Suddenly, she heard a
thin, whistling, breaking sound high over-head. There is a breed of wild ducks
whose wings make a singing, or rather a whistling sound as they cut through the
air. They usually fly so high that you can hardly see them, and only know the
flock is there from the sound. This time, the ducks came lower and, after
describing a huge semicircle in the air, alighted on the very swamp where the
Frog had her home.
"Quack-quack,"
said one of the ducks. "We've a long way to go, so we'd better have
something to eat here." On hearing this, the Frog quickly hid in the
water. She knew that the ducks would not eat her, a big and fat frog, but still
it was safer to duck under the snag.
But she so wanted to hear
where the ducks were going, that after a little thought she ventured to poke
her goggle-eyed face out of the water.
"Quack-quack,"
said another duck. "It's getting cold. We must hurry to the South, we must hurry to the South!"
And all the other ducks
began to quack in loud approval. "Forgive me for butting in," the
Frog said timidly. "But what is that place where you are hurrying, that
south?
The ducks flocked round
the Frog. Their first thought was to eat her, but then each of the ducks
decided that she was too big and would stick in the throat. And then they all
began to scream together, flapping their wings: "It's lovely in the south'
It's warm there now. There are such nice, warm swamps' and such fat worms! Oh,
it's lovely in the south!"
Their excited screaming
almost deafened the Frog. She got them to keep quiet at last, and begged the
duck which seemed to have more sense than the others to tell her just what the South
was.
And when the duck told
her, the Frog thought it truly wonderful, but she was a cautious soul, and so
she asked to make sure: "Are there any midges and mosquitoes there?"
"Oh, clouds of
them!" replied the duck. The Frog gave a croak, and quickly turned round
to see if any of her friends had heard her croaking in the autumn. But she
simply could not help croaking, if only once. 'Take me with you," she said
to the ducks.
"The idea!"
replied the surprised ducks. "How can we take you along? You've no
wings."
"When are you starting?" asked the Frog.
"Soon, very
soon," cried all the ducks together. "Quack, quack,
quack, quack! It's cold here. We must hurry south, south, south!"
"Give me five
minutes, will you?" begged the Frog. "I'll be back, I'm sure to think
of something."
She flopped into the water
from the snag on which she had climbed again, dived into the mud and buried
herself in it completely so that nothing should interfere with her thinking.
The five minutes passed, the ducks decided to take off, and in that precise
moment the Frog popped out of the water near the snag, and her face beamed as
brightly as a frog's face can beam.
"I've thought of
something! I've found a way," she cried. "Let two of you take a twig
in your bills, and I'll hang on it in the middle. You'll fly and carry me. The
only thing is you must not quack and I must not croak, then everything will be
fine."
Although carrying even a
light frog for thousands of miles and never quacking was not much fun, the
ducks were so delighted with the Frog's cleverness that they all agreed to
carry her. They would change every two hours, and since there was so many of
them and just one frog, their turn would not come too often. They found a good,
strong twig, two of the ducks took the ends in their bills while the Frog hung
by her mouth in the middle, and the whole flock took wing.
The Frog's breath caught
from the terrible height to which the ducks raised her; besides, they did not
keep in line properly and jerked the twig. The poor Frog swung in the air like
a paper clown, clenching her jaws with all her might for fear of loosening her
hold and dashing on the ground far below. Even so, she soon became used to this
strange position and began to take a look round her. Hanging from the twig she
could not very well see the fields, meadows, rivers and hills which flickered
past very quickly, but still she could look up and see behind her a bit, so she
was proud and happy just the same.
"Aren't I clever to
think of this!" she said to herself.
In the meantime, the
ducks flying behind the front pair that carried her, praised her with loud
cries. "Isn't our frog brainy," they said. "There aren't many as
brainy even among the ducks"
The Frog wanted to thank
them, but remembering in time" that if she opened her mouth she'd fall
from that terrible height, she clenched her jaws all the harder and kept quiet.
She swung like that all day; the ducks changed in flight, smartly passing the
twig to the next pair, but it was terribly frightening, and the Frog almost
croaked from fear, but she had to be brave and brave she was.
In the evening, the flock
stopped for the night in a strange swamp. At dawn, they were off again, but
this time the Frog faced front, and not back as before, the better to see what
was below. The ducks flew over reaped fields, yellow forests, and villages
where the harvest was stacked in ricks. They could
hear people talking and the sound of the flails with which they threshed the
rye. The people craned their necks to see the flock and, noticing something
strange about it, pointed with their hands. The Frog terribly wanted to fly
lower over the ground, to let the people see her and to hear what they said
about her. At the next halt she said to the ducks: "Couldn't we fly a bit
lower? The height makes me dizzy and I'm afraid I'll fall if I suddenly feel
bad."
The kind ducks promised
not to fly so high. And the following day they flew so low that they could make
out what people said on the ground.
"Look, look,"
the children cried in one of the villages. "Look, the ducks are carrying a
frog!" The Frog heard them, and her heart leapt.
"Look, look,"
the grown-ups shouted in the next village. "You've never seen the
like!"
Could they know that it was her idea and not the ducks', the Frog wondered.
"Look, look,"
the children cried in the third village they flew over. "Who on earth
could have thought of such a clever thing!"
This was too much for the
Frog and, forgetting caution, she screamed at the top of her voice: "I
did! It was my idea, mine!"And, with this
scream, she went hurtling down to the ground. The ducks cried in alarm; one of
them tried to catch the frog in flight, and missed. The Frog, with all her four
paws jerking, fell quickly, but as the ducks had been flying very quickly too,
she fell not on the hard road, above which she started screaming, but further
on, at the edge of the village, flopping luckily into a large, dirty pond.
She popped out of the
water at once, and screamed excitedly at the top of her voice:
"It was my idea, mine!" But there was no one to hear her. The local
frogs had hidden in the water, frightened by the sudden splash. They now began
to appear from the water one by one, and all stared in dismay at the stranger.
The Frog told them how
she had been thinking all her life and had at last invented a new,
extraordinary manner of traveling. She had her own ducks, she told the frogs, who carried her wherever she wanted to go. She had been to
the South where it was so lovely, where the swamps were so beautiful and warm,
and where there were clouds of midges and all kinds of other delicious insects.
"I just dropped in to see how you were," she said. "I'll stay
with you till spring until my ducks come back for me. I let them off, you
see."
But the ducks never came
back. They thought the Frog had crashed on the hard road, and were very sorry
for her.