By a quiet pond, at the side of a cloud-topped mountain in Peru, lived a small green frog and his large green family. When the early evenings darkened the sky, the frogs would gather on the slippery banks by the water and listen to family legends and to stories of the land that lay beyond their tranquil home. The little frog was the youngest of many brothers and sisters, and his life seemed very ordinary when he heard of his relatives’ wild adventures.
“Sometimes the sun was so large and hot that it sucked the water from the ground,” his green grandfather croaked. “Your toes turned brown and you could hardly hop across the hot earth.”
“And once,” his older brother excitedly said, “a cloud swooped down and carried us up and up into the sky until the air turned dark and there were great flashes of light.” The little frog gasped in horror. “And then we washed down with the slanting rain to the ground. It was raining frogs that day!”
“Remember those great orange flowers as big as the moon,” another said, “and those enormous insects? What frog feast one of those would have made!” Then two slightly younger frog voices chimed. “And there were rainbows in the mist above the waterfalls and we slid on them.”
“Until your bottoms got sore!” croaked a third gleefully, and their mother scolded him into silence. After such evenings, the little frog could not sleep. He stared at the moon and wondered if his travels would ever become a part of frog history.
How deep these young frogs’ croaks were becoming, thought the small frog dreamily. They had returned from their wanderings quite changed—larger, ready for action, jostling and pushing each other like young warriors. And, the little frog remembers sadly, they laughed at him rudely when he slipped on a mossy rock or missed a juicy bug to eat.
“Never mind, frogling,” they would say in their jolly, rough voices. “You’ll grow up one of these days and go downstream. Of course, it’s not the same anymore. Getting pretty tame these days.” His time would come, the little frog knew, but what if, when he got there, it would no longer differ from the place where he lived? His throat grew tight and throbbed with pain.
Sometimes the frog was left with only his own imagination to entertain him. The others all felt they were too big to play silly games with youngsters like him.
One sunny day, he sat upon a rock casting a dark shadow, as dark as his thoughts, until, as he stretched his legs, he saw the shadow change and change again with every move he made. Curving his back and holding up two toes, his shadow became a horned snail. Standing tall on two hind feet, he became a giant frog, and using a lily flower as a trumpet, he screamed into the rocks until his voice sounded like thunder. Several of his sisters splashed madly in the water at the noise, and the little frog laughed raucously until they pelted him with small stones. It was magical! Life was already exciting. Except on cloudy days, of course, when he slept under the green leaves and dreamed away the long afternoons.
Occasionally, as the small green frog sat upon the rock amusing himself, he would see a young girl coming down the steep mountain path carrying a load of wash to the stream. Always hovering behind her was a monstrous, bloody-beaked bird. Bald and hunch-backed, with a ruff of unkempt feathers about his scrawny neck, the condor was a frightening sight.
