The land frogs gave the signal. TLesa left tha pool when 
spawning-time was past, and, through midsummer, roamed 
afield, and fattened on the grasshoppers. But autumn 
brought the liuaats homo, for they, too, wintered in tho 
mud. 
Thfl silence of the pool grew heavier, tenser; as though 
some crisis thre.atened it, as though some pent-up energy 
sought outlet from its depths. 
Yet life restrained itself, till Rana blinked. 
Was it a sign? Or answer to a sign? 
A wind-sped ripple danced across the water; a finch 
Bcreamcd from her cloi.4er in the willows; a footfall half a 
field av/ay stole vibrant to the hollowed bank, and scared the 
adventurers stranded in the grass. 
The pool roused from its slumbers, and, thrilling with 
new springs of life, with sense of strife perpetual, with dread 
of danger unforeseen, dragged slowly from the quagmire of 
oblivion. 
Flop! fell a great green grasshopper past liana's nose. 
His feelers streamed behind him. He dropped with shins 
hinged to his fleshy thiglia, with network of his leaf-green 
wings spread sodden on the water. 
Before they snapped together, Rana had him. 
She launched with one quick back-thrust from her leaf, 
and gulped him with a tongue-flick, and rode at ease, with 
balanced legs, rocked on her buoyant element. 
The feeding hour had come again. 
Gay dragon-flies sped to and fro, darting, reversing, 
wheeling; with rainbow-tinted wings a-whirr to match the 
rainbow shimmer. 
Dull splashes sounded from the reeds, and flops, and 
throbs, and gurglings. 
The swallow's flight that flecked tho blue, trailed mir- 
rored shadows criss-cro.^s on the ripples. 
The air was thronged v.'ith life's redundant echoes — the 
gossip of the haymakers, the neighing of the stallion in the 
close, the drowsy lowing of the driven kine. 
Rana, still idly floating, stared goggle-eyed and listened. 
The distant voices had no message for her; but presently 
came notes of instant menace, the flip and flop of frightened 
frog-folk diving. 
Rana sank quietly dovmwards, until her nostrils only 
cleared the water. 
What sound was this? 
The yap of fox she knew, the grunt of hern, the squeaks 
of stoat and rat. But it was none of these — softer it was, and 
more sustained, a lecherous, sibilant love-note. It chained 
her, fascinated her. She slewed about to search for it, and, 
ori a sudden, checked and froze to stone. 
With browning channel in his wake, with muddied 
smear across the weed (as though his trail were tainted), the 
Water Snake slid from the swaying reeds. 
His eyes were fixed on Rana's eyes. He made soft 
Burring music. His tail was hitched about a thickened reed- 
stem. 
Rana stared back. Her hind-legs slowly rose awash, 
then slowly stretched behind her. Her forelegs stretched 
opposed to them. She floated like a stick upon the water; 
and, like a stick, drew slowly to the bank. 
The snake's flat head swayed balancing. The primrose 
collar on his neck had warmed to foxy orange; the olive of 
his back and sides matched the rank pond-weeds under him; 
his blue-grey belly melted in the ripples. 
And Rana, floating with her legs a-wash, her paddle-feet 
immovable, drew shorevrards like a needle to a lodestone. 
The snake's head steadied over her. He seemed to 
bal.ince motionless, but, from the anchored tail of him, crept 
shuddering ripples scale to scale, and spent themselves in his 
thin forking tongue. 
Rana had stranded close inshore. 
Her pool, her leaf, her kindred were forgotten. 
The tongue benumbed her consciousness, constrained her 
course, effaced her per.sonality. 
Just as a power outside herself compelled her in the 
autumn to the mud, so now an impulse from without com- 
pelled hsr passive to the jaws which gaped their hideous 
summons. 
Yet, in some sense, she felt the menacing difference. 
No safe retreat awaited her, no sanctuary of ooze. 
Her instinct warned her of annihilation. Her brain 
forestalled the inevitable, foretasted the unknown. 
The snake's jaws widened slowly. They hid the steely 
glitter of the eyes; they loosed the twist and flicker of the 
tongue. 
Wider they stretched and wider still, and lengthened 
out towards her. The reeds were lost behind them, the 
shelving bank, tho sky itself. 
Rana sat up, crooked both hind-Icga, leapt, and, lik» 
arrow deftly aimed, dropped head-first in the gape. 
The jaws clicked to, luxated bone from bone, spread lat- 
ticed to embrace her head and shoulders. 
Her hind-legs, brandished wide apart, waved their last 
message to the world. 
A gluey slime enveloped her. A worming of the guUet'i 
walls dragged her with screwing down-pull to the belly. 
The imprisoned air drummed in her stifled lungs. A 
surge of frothing bubbles lapped her face. It crept between 
her tightened lips. It ate into her close-veiled eyes. It 
stung and scalded, rotted flesh and bone. The sense of 
death stole over her, or, rather, of life's slow disintegration 
— a lethargy distinct from stroke of sun, in that its dull 
imaginings were crystallised in pain. 
And suddenly the darkness leapt, and pitched, and 
reeled gyrating. Her dangling legs lashed to and fro. Her 
palsied nerves awoke to quickened feeling. 
The down-pull of the gullet ceased abruptly. Ita 
muscle-tautened walls relaxed. 
As her feet swayed, the weight of them tugged at her 
slime-smeared body, and dragged her slowly backwards from 
the abyss. 
She kicked to find a purchase. She squirmed and 
writhed and met no check. 
Her head slipped clear. Her hands slipped clear. Sh« 
dropped into the void. 
A tilt of Nature's balance had released her. 
The snake had lain exposed to gorge his meal — the 
scales about his yellow throat stretched on the drawn siia 
clear of one another; his lower jaws disjointed from their 
hinging ; his upper jaws loosed from the palate bone. 
His head was a broad target. 
From towering pine the buzzard sighted him, and, 
swooping, drove her talons at his back, and soared with him 
on high. 
With broken spine he dangled from her claws, and Rana 
dangled from his mouth, and, of her own weight, slipped 
adrift and fell. 
She had not seen a feather of her ally. 
She fell feet-spread, and squelched like flattened egg. 
The air whooped from her lungs; her tongue protruded. 
And yet she was not dead. Long hours she lay, dead te 
all outer seeming, but, in the healing shades of night, a 
miracle was wrought. 
Her tongue crept slowly back to its set station. Her 
lungs once more drank air. Her belly filled and rounded 
like a bladder. Her pupils, which had closed to slits, 
widened to gold-rimmed spheres again. She blinked, sh* 
closed her triple lids, and gathered up her feet beneath her 
body. The world was homing to her— light in her eyes, sound 
in her ears, a livelier tint about her sweat-drenched skin. 
She woke to sudden consciousness, and listened to th« 
night. 
She gazed at the star-spangled sky. 
What were these glittering points of gold which flecked 
the infinite blue ? Did frogs celestial blink at her, or glow 
worms of a world beyond her reach? 
She gazed at the stone-laden ground. 
What was this dusty grit beneath her feet ? This sun- 
baked sand which clung to her moist skin ? Where were 
her palaces of reed? Where the soft oozy mud? Could 
some mad chase of grasshoppers have brought her to this 
desert? But instinct checked her questionings. A single 
thought obsessed her brain — how she might come to water. 
Round her were earthy-smelling plants, and voices un- 
familiar — the cheep of partridges astray, the churring of tho 
nightjar. 
But suddenly, from westward, came, faint with distance, 
strains which had a meaning, 
Brek-ek-ek-elc-eh-ek-ek-ek-cxl Ko-ax. Eorex. Kro-ex, 
Kro-ah! 
They floated wind-borne up the slope, zigzagged through 
stiffened grass-stems, through nettle-beds, throu°gh parsley- 
green, through a maze of vetch and bindweed. The campions 
caught the echo of them, and flung it to the ox-eyes. They 
spent themselves in undertones against the sand-clifi wall. 
Rana sat up with ears agog. 
•The past was blotted from her mind. She made no effort 
to unite the severed strands of memory. She hopped straight- 
way towards tho beckoning sound. Night-long she hopped. 
At times she paused, took bearings, and pressed on. She 
reached her goal at daybreak, circled the four-square bed of 
reeds, and, from the overhanging bank, gazed rapturously 
at the throng of heads which peeped white-throated from the 
rippled surface. 
Then, with a leap magnificent, she plunged back to hex 
world. 
frinW by Tin Vicioau UovsM PMrana Co.,ljtD.^ Tudor Street, Whitefriars, London, E.Q. 
