Animal Planet

We wandered up the banks of the local wetlands with small plastic vials to collect water samples. It was mid-September, still summer in Kansas. The ground was dry, the water low. In the distance, a dark mass squirmed near the water’s edge. A bullfrog hopped frantically toward the pond, one of its back legs stuck deep in the jaws of a snake. The frog—larger than I imagined a snake of that size, only a foot long, typically ate—dragged the snake through the dirt. My classmates and I circled as if watching a schoolyard fight.

I had seen mice dropped into the boa’s cage at the pet store a dozen times. They were born condemned to this fate. They waited in a dark box until the day arrived to fill their role. What I witnessed by the water was different. This was the type of hunt featured in programs on Animal Planet. These moments invite you to take sides, to bet, to win. Our biology teacher stood behind the crowd, watching with keen interest. An extra lesson.

The class divided their loyalties. The boys rooted for the snake, showed little sympathy for the frog. Many took out cell phones and recorded low-resolution videos. Some of the girls hung onto each other, watching intermittently through the latticework of their fingers clasped over their eyes. We voiced our sympathies for the frog and wondered aloud what would happen if we interfered, tried to distract the snake into letting go. Our teacher forbade us from doing so. Just because this was distressing did not give us license to disrupt the natural order of things, she explained. I silently rooted for the frog, though I felt guilty for doing so. Predators need prey. I knew that. Yet I stood there, chewing on my thumbnail, hoping that somehow, the snake would give up.

This gendered divide feels almost too simplistic to be true. Men identifying with predators, with violence and domination and consumption, and women with prey, with vulnerability and weakness and fear. But there I was, witnessing it. Except we weren’t men and women yet. We were freshmen in high school. Boys and girls, stalked by the frightening possibilities of our burgeoning adulthood. Car accidents and drugged drinks and climate collapse. Failure and rejection and loneliness. We were all frogs seemingly fated for the jaws of a snake.

But the boys may become snakes. The girls will stay frogs. That knowledge was a part of us, even if we were just growing conscious of it. Many snakes do not eat frogs, but we will always be vulnerable to the ones that do. Soon, I will learn that often we cannot identify a predator until we are trapped in their jaws.

For a moment, the frog broke free and broached the water’s edge. The class gasped and murmured and shushed. The frog’s broken leg dragged behind it. The snake reared back before striking and capturing it again. But the brief taste of freedom renewed the frog’s fight and it thrashed harder, scrambling along the dusty ground. What Animal Planet can never truly convey is how long these hunts last.

Eventually, the frog, exhausted, stopped fighting.

This hunt was won by breaking the will, not the body. Perhaps that breaking didn’t happen in a few minutes. Perhaps this wasn’t the first snake to capture this frog’s leg. Perhaps it lived a lifetime trying to avoid and escape brutality. Perhaps this is what it really means to be a frog. The snake would eat. If it wasn’t this frog, if this frog had escaped, there would be another.

After the snake curled around the frog and began to eat, we would still be expected to collect our water samples, to slide the samples underneath a microscope lens, to observe the teeming microscopic organisms, to understand all that keeps our ecosystems in balance.

Molly Weisgrau lives in Corvallis, Oregon, where she is pursuing an MFA. She writes about sad kids, rogue body parts, and midwestern summer weirdness. Her work appears in Flash Fiction Magazine, Every Day Fiction, Waif Magazine, and more.

Published January 15 2023