Peep

At night, Bunky sometimes emitted a two-syllable ribbit, a sort of croaky hee-haw: the sound we’d heard over the baby monitor. We read that only male African clawed frogs made this sound, and that it was a mating call.

I often wrote late into the night. Bunky shared my circadian rhythm. For years—ever since Bunky’s aquarium had migrated from Henry’s room to the kitchen counter—I’d been going downstairs for a snack at 2:00 a.m., and there he’d been, softly calling for a mate he’d never meet.

— Anne Fadiman, Frog: And Other Essays

The other night, I was standing outside in the evening, enjoying air that was unusually cool for August, when I heard a strange sound from the weeds and overgrowth in front of the house.

Peep.

I thought, “What the hell was that?” Then I heard it again.

Peep.

I followed the sound and could just make out a small shape among the weeds. For a moment I thought it was a bird and wondered why it was on the ground. Injured, perhaps? Surely not a baby at this time of year.

Then it came into view. It was a toad, and a small snake had its right rear leg in its mouth. The snake was latched on near the hip. The toad would struggle occasionally, trying to pull itself free, and every so often it made that sound again. The snake held on.

I stood there watching for several minutes. Sentimentally, my sympathies were with the toad. But there was nothing useful for me to do, or at least nothing I could do without simply choosing one animal over the other. The snake had to eat too. What sense was there in taking sides?

Then, for some reason, the snake let go and zipped away into the weeds. Perhaps it finally noticed the large mammal looming nearby. The toad stayed where it was, its leg bloodied, breathing rapidly. I went back inside. When I came back outside twenty minutes later, it still hadn’t moved. The snake had not returned.

Had there been no sound, I suspect the whole thing would have been less affecting. It would have looked almost mechanical: jaws clamped around flesh, muscles pulling against muscles, predator and prey each executing behavioral programs vastly older than either animal. Nature doing what nature does. But there was that peep. What did it signify? Pain? Fear? Pleading for mercy? Begging for help?

Those questions are too human, but we can’t help but filter experience through words and concepts. A toad presumably does not possess cerebral concepts such as mercy, nor formulate a thought resembling Please, somebody help me. The sound may have been entirely instinctive, an evolved distress call produced when restrained by a predator. Perhaps it serves to startle an attacker. Perhaps it sometimes attracts another animal and disrupts the attack. One can describe the whole event without granting the toad anything resembling a human understanding of its predicament. But the next question is phenomenological: what, if anything, is happening for the animal while the sound is being made? The larger problem is that we can observe nervous systems only from the outside. We can measure electrical activity, identify nociceptors, trace neural pathways, watch behavior. But what, if anything, is it like from in there?

Bunky called at night for a mate who would never come. The poignancy of that image does not depend on imagining Bunky lying awake at two in the morning brooding over his romantic prospects. He did not have to understand loneliness in order for the scene to contain something we recognize as lonely. An organism issued a call into an environment in which the thing the call existed to summon could never appear. My toad’s peep seems like the darker counterpart. Something has me. Get away. Whatever those human words distort, whatever they add, the sound resists being reduced entirely to scenery. The toad is not saying “Oh, God, help me!” translated from Toadish. But maybe “peep” is the biological ancestor of that phrase, the single-celled organism of speech. We sense what he means. We know what our equivalent sounds would mean if a python had us by the leg.

The haiku poet Issa wrote, after the death of his daughter:

The world of dew
is only the world of dew—
and yet…oh, and yet…

That “and yet” is what makes the poem unbearably sublime. Issa knows perfectly well that the world is impermanent. He knows the Buddhist teaching. Everything arises and passes away. The world of dew is only the world of dew. And yet…

The world red in tooth and claw is the world red in tooth and claw. Toads eat bugs and are eaten by snakes in turn. The snake was committing no injustice. The universe had not malfunctioned. If I had rescued the toad, I would merely have substituted the snake’s hunger for the toad’s injury. Nature contains competing interests but no court of appeal. And yet…

Odds are fair that one day within the next few decades, I may find myself lying in a hospital bed, heavily sedated, reduced in outward appearance to little more than biological machinery. Opiates may have dissolved most of what an observer would recognize as personality. Death may have its jaws locked around one of my vital organs. Perhaps I will make a feeble groan. What would it signify? Pain? Fear? Pleading for mercy? Begging for help? A neurologist could conceivably point to a brain scan and explain that the sound was reflexive. The relevant networks were firing automatically. There was no evidence that the coherent person formerly known as “me” remained present behind the sound. Perhaps the doctor would be right.

The world red in tooth and claw
is the world red in tooth and claw—
And yet…groan. And yet…peep.