Because the temperature was so good by late afternoon, I decided to venture down to the prairie for a look around and some reading outside. In the environmental center's garden is a tiny fishpond with accompanying Adirondack chairs that seemed like a good perch for working through some more Thomas Hardy--until the first frog turned up, over on the opposite edge of the pond from where I was sitting. I had only my macro lens, but I did my best slow-motion creeping and got as close as I could to the pond's edge. I disturbed them every time, though, alas. It didn't take long for me to give up on reading altogether and just to take a seat on the stones that edge the pond--just to sit, just to see what would happen next. A tadpole adolescent shot to the surface. Another one followed. A few minutes later, the frog you see here--who swam off a split second after I took this picture--came to the surface and hung there, his nose and eyes out of the water, his body perpendicular to its surface. He hung there for a time too brief for me to turn the camera back on and catch him; seeing me, he slipped backwards into the water but then darted in my direction--a mistake he realized he'd made just as soon as he got ready to surface again and found my inexplicable dark bulk even closer and huger than before he'd submerged.

Though I could spot other frogs with their eyes and noses above water at the pond's edges--one smartly hid himself in bright green algae so that his eyes were mere bumps in its surface--I did not see that darting frog again before rain started to fall.