The Frog in the Woodpile

Soren found it when he pulled the third log off the woodpile. A frog, sitting upright in the gap, eyes half open, one leg tucked under like it had been caught mid-step and told to hold still forever.

"Don't touch it," said Maya. "Wait. Touch it."

"Which one."

"Touch it. I want to know if it's cold."

Soren put one finger on the frog's back. He pulled his hand away fast.

"It's hard," he said. "Maya, it's hard like the log."

Maya crouched down so her face was level with it. The frog did not breathe. There was a little frost on its eyes, a white film, like the windshield in the morning.

"It's dead," she said. "Obviously it's dead."

"Then why did you say wait."

She didn't answer that. She was looking at the way it sat. "Dead things fall over," she said. "This one is sitting up. Soren, it's sitting up like it sat down on purpose."

Soren's grandmother was on the back step with her coffee, watching them dismantle her woodpile. "It's a dead frog," she called. "Put it in the compost and wash your hands."

"It's frozen," Soren called back.

"Frozen and dead are the same thing for a frog," said his grandmother. "They're not turtles. Wash your hands."

Maya picked the frog up. The whole thing came up as one piece, stiff, no bend in it anywhere. She knocked it very gently against the side of the log, the way you'd knock a stone, and it made a small hard sound.

"That's ice," she said. "That's not a sleeping frog. That's a frog made of ice."

"You can't be made of ice and be alive," Soren said. "Ice would pop your cells. We did this with the lettuce in the freezer. The leaves went to mush when they thawed because the ice broke everything inside."

"Right," said Maya. "So this should be mush. But it's sitting up." She turned it over in her palm. "Sitting up and not mush."

They looked at each other.

"Put it somewhere warm," Maya said.

"It's dead."

"Put it somewhere warm and we'll know."

They took it inside, past the grandmother, who said put that outside, and they said one minute, and she said you two, and let them. They set the frog on a dish towel on the kitchen counter, away from the stove, just in the ordinary warm of the room.

Then they waited. This is the hard part of any experiment, the part nobody tells you about, the part where nothing happens for a long time and you have to decide whether nothing happening is the answer.

"If it were alive," Soren said slowly, "its heart would be going. Hearts don't stop and start."

"Yours does every time you're scared, a little."

"That's not stopping. That's skipping." He leaned close to the frog. "This isn't skipping. This is off. There's no off and then on."

Maya put one finger lightly on the frog's side. "There's no heartbeat," she agreed. "There's no anything." She frowned. "But explain the sitting up."

They couldn't explain the sitting up. They sat with the frog and the not-explaining for twenty minutes, and the grandmother came and looked over their shoulders and said, with the certainty of a person who had grown up in these woods, "It is dead. I have seen a hundred dead frogs. Wash the towel after."

And then the frog's throat moved.

It was small. A single twitch, under the chin, the smallest pulse, like a bubble coming up under skin.

"Soren."

"I saw it."

They both went completely silent. The grandmother had gone back to her coffee. The frog's throat moved again, and then there was a long pause, so long that Soren started to think he had wanted it so badly he'd invented it, and then it moved a third time, and a fourth, faster now, settling into something.

"Its heart," Maya whispered. "It's starting its heart."

"From off," Soren said. "From all the way off." He had his hand pressed flat on the counter and he could feel his own heart going, which had never once stopped, not for a second in eleven years, and here was this frog in front of him that had stopped completely and was choosing to begin again.

The ice was going out of it. They could see it. The eyes cleared first, the white film softening to wet black. The frost on its back beaded into ordinary water. A back leg, the tucked one, slid loose and stretched.

"It's thawing from the inside," Maya said. "Look. The middle's going soft and the toes are still hard. It's thawing from its heart out."

"Two-thirds of it was ice," Soren said, very quietly, like he was working it out and saying it at the same time. "Most of the water in it was actually ice. And it didn't die. It should've turned to mush like the lettuce and it didn't. There's something in it. Something that protects the cells when the rest freezes." He looked at Maya. "It's full of something we don't have."

The grandmother had come back. She was standing behind them with her coffee gone cold in her hand, not saying it is dead, not saying anything, looking at the frog the way you look at a thing you have been wrong about your whole life.

The frog blinked. A real blink, one eye then the other.

"It died for the winter," Maya said. "On purpose. Every winter. And then it un-dies."

"It's not dying," Soren said. "That's the thing. We just don't have a word for what it's doing instead."

Maya slid the dish towel to the edge of the counter and lowered it toward the floor. The frog gathered its thawed legs beneath it, sat up the way they had found it sitting, gave one small breath that fogged nothing because the kitchen was warm, and hopped off the towel onto the floor.