offered.
The piece of coal was the size of a large man's fist. Ian placed it at the centre of their attention on a tussock of grass.
"Get the hammer," commanded Jeremy.
Ian narrowly beat Nathan to their improvised toolkit and returned with a claw hammer. Jeremy began to say something, but Ian's fist was already on its downswing arc. The coal lump shattered noiselessly, followed immediately by a gagging intake of breath from Ian. Amidst the black dust - apparently the remnants of its home - lay a green frog. Ian dabbed the prongs of the hammer upon the frog's head and was rewarded with a single coughing gasp. Jeremy was in a high state of nervous excitement.
"Do you guys know how old this thing must be?"
Ian's finger replaced the hammer resting on the animal's spine.
"It must be a thousand years old," he wondered. "It has been trapped down there or something.”
Nathan's voice was gently scornful.
"That's impossible," he said. "How could it live in rock?"
"Coal," corrected Jeremy.
Ian's voice was breathless: "Suspended animation. They hibernate for years like that. Maybe this one just forgot to wake up like that guy in the story.”
"Until we woke it up," said Nathan, tentatively touching the frog.
"We can take it to a lab or something and they'll pay us for it!" exclaimed Ian. A single muscle in the frog's back twitched suddenly and Nathan flinched away. His friends laughed and punched him lightly.
"Ian, they'll never pay us. What they'll do is take it away and then cut it up or something.”
"Vivisect," said Nathan quickly, in a move to redeem himself.
Jeremy scowled at Nathan, his annoyance in plain sight.
"OK then," said Ian, "We need to keep this secret. We keep it as a pet and don't tell anyone.”
It seemed that the silence of the forest was palpable for a moment, a lost second where the birdsong died away and the soft wind was stilled by their pensive thoughts. Instinctively, Jeremy looked around. Nathan regarded the coal bunker's hatch with longing.
We should just throw it in back in and forget we ever found it, he thought. It's not something cool like a baby dragon or a giant spider egg.
That image gave him a delicious shiver down his spine. A vast, silky cocoon, bigger than their heads. They would discern a pulsing within, many limbs fighting to escape the enclosing sac. He looked at the frog again. It was a smooth green, uninterrupted by stripe or spot. Its bulbous eyes regarded him coolly. Nathan decided it would give them some sport after all.
"Let's feed it," he said.
The boys collected a glossy black menagerie of bugs and spiders, at which the frog merely stared.
"I think it's in shock," Jeremy said with an air of knowledge.
Ian prodded a luckless beetle to the rim of the frog's mouth.
"Come on, you must be hungry," he sighed soothingly.
Bored at the frog's inactivity, he produced a magnifying glass. When the clouds thinned to expose the sun's weak face, he angled it carefully over the bugs to gain an optimal burning vector. But the insects were lucky that afternoon: the focused corona of light was sufficient to merely warm their backs rather than put them to flame.
Their decision on who would take custodianship of the frog was lengthy and not without controversy. A throwing competition was vetoed, in recognition of Nathan's admitted lack of skill with the pine cone. Short straws, with its aura of commando heroics, was Ian's suggestion. It was the one they adopted.
And so Nathan found himself walking home, with the frog occupying a snug corner of one pocket.
His father was gone for the weekend and the house was slowly filling with Scott's friends. Nathan always enjoyed these nights. They seemed to always be in Springtime, Friday afternoons when the music blasting from the windows of their house would reach him on a breeze just tainted with the scent of blossoms. Inside, Scott would be holding court in a kingdom of beer and amplitude. To Nathan, Scott's friends seemed as a race of warrior giants. Amongst them he was less a mascot than a talisman.
Like him, they were deemed outcast at an early stage. They had grouped in a tight cadre, raising the standard of defiance from within the grim citadel of their music. Nathan had grown up with the name of every doom-laden band: Crucifuge, Blunt Trauma, Chromatic Death.
To turn a room of Scott's friends to laughter he merely had to repeat a lyric, his nervous voice tripping over the words describing mutilation and vengeance. They would arm-wrestle with him and pretend to lose, which Nathan loved. He would ask to see every new tattoo that crawled across their arms and suggest new designs. The sun that was his father's praise, on the rare occasion it could be felt, fell on his upturned face without warmth. He looked to Scott as an agent of intercession between himself and his father's love.
"Did dad say where he was going?" he asked, raising his voice against the music.
Scott fake-punched his brother, making him flinch and smile at the same time.
"No, but he said for us to both be cool.”
"I've got something to show you" Nathan said suddenly, and rushed upstairs. He returned with a shoebox whose lid he lifted with a magician’s flourish. Inside, crouched amidst a thicket of newspaper, was the frog. Scott looked in.
"You need to give it some water. It'll die for sure like that.”
Nathan nodded. He wanted desperately to reveal the story of the coal, but he dared not.
"Does it always look at you that way?" asked Scott. The eyes that shone upwards from the box looked more feline than amphibian. They blinked occasionally, but their icy touch did not waver from his face. It was a look of pure knowing, unadulterated by fear or timidity. Before Nathan could stop him, Scott had scooped the animal up, opening his jaws wide as if to swallow it. The frog did not struggle. Eyeball to eyeball, it matched Scott's gaze. Finally, his brother laughed.
"It's a weird little thing. Have you given it a name?"
"No," said Nathan.
Scott said nothing, and threw back his beer.
Nathan spent much of that night watching the shoebox beside his bed. He had placed a bowl of water and some dead crickets inside for the frog. In that imagined the animal undergoing a slow transformation as he slept, awakening to a thousand-year hunger for flesh no dead bug could match. Its green skin would mottle and blister to a landscape of putrescent sores. Orbs of thick pus would fill its eye sockets. The shoebox would split under its expanding bulk, as it became something monstrous and ravening that spilled across his bed towards his sleeping form in an avalanche of teeth.
When Nathan did sleep, he dreamt of a long beach under a gray sky. He found himself in the cold ocean beyond a line of surf. A wave was rearing above him like a vast blue awning. With inexorable momentum it receded upwards to fill the sky with water, forming a jewelled cavern beneath. Now lying on wet sand, Nathan glimpsed the sun dimly though a translucent sea-roof. The sapphire-hued tunnel constricted, rolling into itself with a cataclysm of foam. Nathan dove into the wave's thick flank and was pummelled forward with its violent motion. Then the surf sucked back over him to surge up into another precipice of water. He ran from the onrushing waves for the rest of the night, an unwanted destiny grasping at his heels.
That was the last weekend before school began again. There was a determined edge to the digging now, a desire to expand the galleries as far as they might dare. Jeremy placed the frog on a small cairn on the command bunker to observe. Nathan stole glances at it, perched on a stone like a tiny Buddha. Its impassive eyes took in everything. They finished their lunch beneath its seat, and Ian gave voice to the thought that crowded their minds.
"Will we take it to school? We could hide it in our bags in a locker or something.”
"Okay," said Jeremy. "But we need to keep it safe.”
Ian drawled a stick in the ground pensively.
"It's not very cool, though, is it?" he inquired. "Just a frog.”
Jeremy smiled.
"All w
e were lucky enough to find is just a frog. I'm sorry it wasn't a lion or a dinosaur, I really am. But that frog is like a billion years old, remember.”
Nathan hefted a pine cone and aimlessly sent it skittering to the rear of their earthworks.
"It's a pretty good secret, Ian," he said in a reassuring tone. "It looks just like any old frog but we know it has special ...” He squinted with effort. At once Jeremy leapt the trench to stand beside his friend, whispering triumphantly to his face:
"Attributes.”
Nathan stood mutely for a moment, then shoved his friend with a laugh.
"Attributes," he parroted, using a teacher's pet tone.
The trio finished their lunch with no more talk of school. They could feel the last free hours roaring over their heads like an artillery barrage. This knowledge fuelled their final burst of work that afternoon and the next day. Jeremy finally linked up their reserve lines with their forward observation posts; Ian completed an escape tunnel to their flank that dipped down lowest towards the road. Nathan added crude bridges to the whole network, constructed of nailed branches.
Late on Sunday, they indulged in rock rolling, a passion they had resisted for weeks. A meter-wide rock, prized from its socket in the earth, wrought a fearsome swathe through the forest as it crashed down the hill. At times it would bound at head-height over the stubby bluffs. When it struck a pine trunk square-on, the resulting impact would roll a thick boom down towards the houses that scattered birds up into the sunlight. Risk and reward were deliciously