The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl

Author:Margaret Renkl [Renkl, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Published: 2023-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

The perfect thirty-fourth anniversary present, it turns out, is tadpoles.

In the outdoor tanks at the pond-supply store, Haywood had noticed some wild tadpoles wiggling among the aquatic plants. When he mentioned to the woman at the cash register that we had failed to attract egg-laying frogs to our own container pond, she offered to catch a few of their tadpoles to donate to the cause.

“What kind of tadpoles?” Haywood asked.

Some of the tadpoles were huge, thumb-sized. “Maybe bullfrogs?” the clerk said. On the other hand, she’d nearly stepped on a tree frog a couple of weeks earlier, so possibly they were tree frogs. One of those two species. Possibly.

It worried me, this business of importing tadpoles from an unknown species into an ecosystem I was obliged to protect. On the other hand, leaving those tadpoles at the store, which was surrounded by a gravel parking lot that butts up against a highway, might be consigning the vast majority of them to their doom. I couldn’t imagine how tadpoles had gotten into those display tanks in the first place.

The appearance of frogs where frogs have never been before is nearly always a mystery to me. There are two swimming pools in our neighborhood that were abandoned during the pandemic—one because the house burned down, the other because the owners of the pool had left town and couldn’t get home again during the quarantine. Both swimming pools somehow filled up with frogs, many different kinds of frogs. All summer long they had made of the night a wild chorus of song.

“Frogs can travel quite a long way on a rainy night,” my naturalist friend pointed out. But how? In this pondless neighborhood, hemmed on all sides by commuter surface roads, they traveled a long way from where?

The next week, after we returned from the Cumberland Plateau, Haywood and I went to pick up our tadpoles, whatever kind of tadpoles they might turn out to be. The clerk pulled out a plastic bag containing water, a cloud of algae, and three small tadpoles—way too small, I felt sure, to be incipient bullfrogs. That much was a relief, at least: I was not confident a forty-gallon stock tank could serve the needs of a single bullfrog, let alone three of them. I was even less confident that a bullfrog could find a bigger pond near enough to move to.

At home, we set the tadpoles free. They wiggled straight down, beneath the floating plants, and disappeared. That’s when it occurred to me that this was destined to be the same old story of nature in medias res. I, with no idea where those tadpoles had come from, would also have no idea what happened to them next. Between the layers of vegetation and the layers of muck already gathered at the bottom of the bucket, I would never see them again.

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