THE TOAD AS TRAVELLER

One summer day I sat myself down on the rail of a small wooden foot-bridge--a very old bridge it looked, bleached to a pale grey colour with grey, green, and yellow lichen growing on it, and very creaky with age, but the rail was still strong enough to support my weight. The bridge was at the hedge side, and the stream under it flowed out of a thick wood over the road and into a marshy meadow on the other side, overgrown with coarse tussocky grass. It was a relief to be in that open sunny spot, with the sight of water and green grass and blue sky before me, after prowling for hours in the wood--a remnant of the old Silchester forest--worried by wood-flies in the dense undergrowth. These same wood-flies and some screaming jays were all the wild creatures I had seen, and I would now perhaps see something better at that spot.

It was very still, and for some time I saw nothing, until my wandering vision lighted on a toad travelling towards the water. He was right out in the middle of the road, a most dangerous place for him, and also difficult to travel in, seeing that it had a rough surface full of loosened stones, and was very dusty. His progress was very slow; he did not hop, but crawled laboriously for about five inches, then sat up and rested four or five minutes, then crawled and rested again. When I first caught sight of him he was about forty yards from the water, and looking at him through my binocular when he sat up and rested I could see the pulsing movements of his throat as though he panted with fatigue, and the yellow eyes on the summit of his head gazing at that delicious coolness where he wished to be. If toads can see things forty yards away the stream was visible to him, as he was on that part of the road which sloped down to the stream.

Lucky for you, old toad, thought I, that it is not market day at Basingstoke or somewhere with farmers and small general dealers flying about the country in their traps, or you would be flattened by a hoof or a wheel long before the end of your pilgrimage.

By and by another creature appeared and caused me to forget the toad. A young water-vole came up stream, swimming briskly from the swampy meadow on the other side of the road. As he approached I tapped the wood with my stick to make him turn back, but this only made him swim faster towards me, and determined to have my own way I jumped down and tried to stop him, but he dived past the stick and got away where he wanted to be in the wood, and I resumed my seat.

There was the toad, when I looked his way, just about where I had last seen him, within perhaps a few inches. Then a turtle-dove flew down, alighting within a yard of the water, and after eyeing me suspiciously for a few moments advanced and took one long drink and flew away. A few minutes later I heard a faint complaining and whining sound in or close to the hedge on my left hand, and turning my eyes in that direction caught sight of a stoat, his head and neck visible, peeping at me out of the wood; he was intending to cross the road, and seeing me sitting there hesitated to do so. Still having come that far he would not turn back, and by and by he drew himself snake-like out of the concealing herbage, and was just about to make a dash across the road when I tapped sharply on the wood with my stick and he fled back into cover. In a few seconds he appeared again, and I played the same trick on him with the same result; this was repeated about four times, after which he plucked up courage enough to make his dash and was quickly lost in the coarse grass by the stream on the other side.

Then a curious thing happened: flop, flop, flop, went vole following vole, escaping madly from their hiding-places along the bank into the water, all swimming for dear life to the other side of the stream. Their deadly enemy did not swim after them, and in a few seconds all was peace and quiet again.

And when I looked at the road once more, the toad was still there, still travelling, painfully crawling a few inches, then sitting up and gazing with his yellow eyes over the forty yards of that weary _via dolorosa_ which still had to be got over before he could bathe and make himself young for ever in that river of life. Then all at once the feared and terrific thing came upon him: a farmer’s trap, drawn by a fast trotting horse, suddenly appeared at the bend of the road and came flying down the slope. That’s the end of you, old toad, said I, as the horse and trap came over him; but when I had seen them cross the ford and vanish from sight at the next bend, my eyes went back, and to my amazement there sat my toad, his throat still pulsing, his prominent eyes still gazing forward. The four dread hoofs and two shining wheels had all missed him; then at long last I took pity on him, although vexed at having to play providence to a toad, and getting off the rail I went and picked him up, which made him very angry. But when I put him in the water he expanded and floated for a few moments with legs spread out, then slowly sank his body and remained with just the top of his head and the open eyes above the surface for a little while, and finally settled down into the cooler depths below.

It is strange to think that when water would appear to be so much to these water-born and amphibious creatures they yet seek it for so short a period in each year, and for the rest of the time are practically without it! The toad comes to it in the love season, and at that time one is often astonished at the number of toads seen gathered in some solitary pool, where perhaps not a toad has been seen for months past, and with no other water for miles around. The fact is, the solitary pool has drawn to itself the entire toad population of the surrounding country, which may comprise an area of several square miles. Each toad has his own home or hermitage somewhere in that area, where he spends the greater portion of the summer season practically without water excepting in wet weather, hiding by day in moist and shady places, and issuing forth in the evening. And there too he hibernates in winter. When spring returns he sets out on his annual pilgrimage of a mile or two, or even a greater distance, travelling in the slow, deliberate manner of the one described, crawling and resting until he arrives at the sacred pool--his Tipperary. They arrive singly and are in hundreds, a gathering of hermits from the desert places, drunk with excitement, and filling the place with noise and commotion. A strange sound, when at intervals the leader or precentor or bandmaster for the moment blows himself out into a wind instrument--a fairy bassoon, let us say, with a tremble to it--and no sooner does he begin than a hundred more join in; and the sound, which the scientific books describe as “croaking,” floats far and wide, and produces a beautiful, mysterious effect on a still evening when the last heavy-footed labourer has trudged home to his tea, leaving the world to darkness and to me.

In England we are almost as rich in toads as in serpents, since there are two species, the common toad, universally distributed, and the rarer natterjack, abundant only in the south of Surrey. The breeding habits are the same in both species, the concert-singing included, but there is a difference in the _timbre_ of their voices, the sound produced by the natterjack being more resonant and musical to most ears than that of the common toad.

The music and revels over, the toads vanish, each one taking his own road, long and hard to travel, to his own solitary home. Their homing instinct, like that of many fishes and of certain serpents that hibernate in numbers together, and of migrating birds, is practically infallible. They will not go astray, and the hungriest raptorial beasts, foxes, stoats, and cats, for example, decline to poison themselves by killing and devouring them.

In the late spring or early summer one occasionally encounters a traveller on his way back to his hermitage. I met one a mile or so from the valley of the Wylie, half-way up a high down, with his face to the summit of Salisbury Plain. He was on the bank at the side of a deep narrow path, and was resting on the velvety green turf, gay with little flowers of the chalk-hills--eye-bright, squinancy-wort, daisies, and milkwort, both white and blue.

The toad, as a rule, strikes one as rather an ugly creature, but this one sitting on the green turf, with those variously coloured fairy flowers all about him, looked almost beautiful. He was very dark, almost black, and with his shining topaz eyes had something of the appearance of a yellow-eyed black cat. I sat down by his side and picked him up, which action he appeared to regard as an unwarrantable liberty on my part; but when I placed him on my knee and began stroking his blackish corrugated back with my finger-tips his anger vanished, and one could almost imagine his golden eyes and wide lipless mouth smiling with satisfaction.

A good many flies were moving about at that spot--a pretty fly whose name I do not know, a little bigger than a house-fly, all a shining blue, with head and large eyes a bright red. These flies kept lighting on my hand, and by and by I cautiously moved a hand until a fly on it was within tongue-distance of the toad, whereupon the red tongue flicked out like lightning and the fly vanished. Again the process was repeated, and altogether I put over half-a-dozen flies in his way, and they all vanished in the same manner, so quickly that the action eluded my sight. One moment and a blue and red-headed fly was on my hand sucking the moisture from the skin, and then, lo! he was gone, while the toad still sat there motionless on my knee like a toad carved out of a piece of black stone with two yellow gems for eyes.

After helping him to a dinner, I took him off my knee with a little trouble, as he squatted close down, desiring to stay where he was, and putting him back among the small flowers to get more flies for himself if he could, I went on my way.

It is easy to establish friendly relations with these lowly creatures, amphibious and reptiles, by a few gentle strokes with the finger-tips on the back. Shortly after my adventure with this toad I was visiting a naturalist friend, who told me of an adventure he had had with a snake. He was out walking with his wife near his home among the Mendips when they spied the snake basking in the sun on the turf, and at the same moment the snake saw them and began quietly gliding away. But they succeeded in overtaking and capturing it, and, although it was a large snake and struggled violently to escape, they soon quieted it down by stroking its back with their fingers. They kept and played with it for half an hour, then put it down, whereupon it went away, but quite slowly, almost as if reluctant to leave them.

So far this was a common experience; I have tamed many grass-snakes in the same way, and the only smooth snake I have ever captured in England was made tame in about ten minutes by holding it on my knee and stroking it. In the instance related by my friend, it would appear that the tameness does not always vanish as soon as the creature finds itself free again. About three days after the incident I have related he was again walking with his wife, and they again found the snake at the same spot, whereupon he, anxious to capture it again, made a dash at it, but the snake on this occasion made no attempt to escape, and when picked up did not struggle. They again kept it some time, caressing it with their fingers, then releasing it as before; later they saw their snake on several occasions, when it acted in the same way, allowing itself to be taken up and kept as long as it was wanted, and then, when released, going very slowly away.

That one first delightful experience of having its back stroked with finger-tips had made a tame snake of it.