The Boys who Befriended Frogs

The Boys Who Befriended Frogs

This story is a continuation of The Boys and the Frogs.

There were frogs who lived in a pond. They had just been scared for their lives due to some boys who had skipped rocks across the pond for fun.

The boys finished having their fun skipping stones in the pond. At some point, the boys noticed a few frogs also occupied the same pond where they skipped the stones. They did not think much of it, only that the frogs would probably be fine. The boys did not even spare enough attention to the frogs to notice when one of them tried speaking up before the boys. One boy named Callum thought he had heard someone else besides his friends speak, so he asked the others, "Did you guys hear someone talking?" However, they brushed it off since they were preoccupied. Though Callum had heard the voice, he was also too busy with his friends to press the question further.

As the boys departed from the pond, the frogs collected themselves from their earlier panic. The oldest frog, known as Harrow, spoke in a frustrated tone, “If only those boys were more considerate of others around them! We could have died from that!”

One of the slightly younger frogs replied, “Their focus is on themselves only. They’re likely to never notice the kind of harm they’re causing us.”

The family of frogs sighed and went about their business dejectedly, hoping for a change in behavior from the boys, though they did not expect it.

The boys who had earlier left the pond headed to a nearby field to play some more. They brought a ball with them and intended on using that. The boys had just become situated how they wanted in the field when some older boys from their area showed up. The younger boys were instantly quiet. The older boys were the bullies of the area, so the younger boys had done their best to avoid them until now.

The tallest and strongest-looking of the older boys, named Soren, walked up to the boy from the younger group who held the ball they brought along. The boy who held the ball happened to be Callum, who earlier thought he had heard someone speak at the pond. Soren looked at Callum for a moment, smirked at him, and quickly snatched the ball away. All of the younger boys immediately looked upset.

After Soren snatched the ball away from him, Callum tried to reach towards the tall older boy to retrieve it and said, “Hey, give that back! It’s ours!”

Soren held the ball above his head where none of the younger boys had any hope of reaching it and said, “No way, it’s definitely more fun this way. Right, guys?” The older boy had looked back towards the rest of his group with his question. The rest of the older boys snickered and nodded along with Soren, who appeared to be their leader.

Soren continued, “How about we all have some fun? Let’s try skipping this ball. But instead of doing it on water like stones…”- he pointed at the head of the younger boy who stood closest to him, which happened to be Callum since he had tried to get the ball back from the older boy- “Let’s skip this ball on all of your heads.”

All of the younger boys looked helpless and felt like it too. They knew at this point they could not do anything against these older boys. Callum and his friends hoped the older boys would leave them alone quicker if they went along with what the older boys said. In the older boys' attempts to skip the ball on the heads of the younger boys, they could not get the ball to bounce off of their heads accurately enough to start skipping. The ball would hit one boy in the head and then bounce away from the next boy in line. After a few more attempts of trying to get the ball to skip across the heads of the younger boys without much luck, the older boys just threw the ball at their heads for fun instead. The older boys grew tired of this after a while and left the younger boys in the field with heads that ached. Soren and his group left the ball in the field with the younger boys, surprisingly. Callum thought he and his friends would never see the ball again, unless the bullies used it to torment them more.

The younger boys trudged back to the pond from earlier, all of them still upset over what had happened with the older boys. The boys approached the pond and rested on the bank very close to the water. They sat there for a moment and then heard movement in the water. The boys looked to the water and noticed frogs. Callum and the other boys realized these were the same frogs they had briefly seen earlier when they skipped the stones. After the terrible event they had just experienced thanks to the older boys, Callum and the others were painfully aware of how similarly they had acted earlier towards the frogs. They had not cared if what they did put the frogs in danger or upset them. They had only focused on their own fun. Now the boys wished to apologize to the frogs and make amends.

The boys bowed their heads in shame and scooted closer to the water. Callum spoke up, “Excuse us, family of frogs. We would like to apologize to you for earlier, and any other time we caused you trouble.”

The oldest frog, Harrow, popped his head out of the water and looked wide-eyed at the boys. For a moment, he thought he hallucinated the boys and their apology. The frog replied, somewhat confused, “I beg your pardon? Did you say apologize?”

Callum spoke again, “Yes, I did. We were reckless and selfish. If there is anything we can do for you, please tell us.”

The oldest frog blinked a few times and then smiled. “I can think of a few things.” He called for his family and they all spoke to the boys together for a little while. They all became friends and the boys ended up coming back to the pond every day to play with the family of frogs.

Author's Note

I wrote this story because I liked the main idea of the original, The Boys and the Frogs, and wanted to expand upon that idea some more. The original story is about a group of boys who are skipping rocks on a pond but pay no mind to a family of frogs who happen to live there. The boys are putting the lives of the frogs in danger by carelessly skipping their rocks right by the frogs, but do not care since they are focused only on the fun they're having. One of the frogs speaks up about the situation, but the story ends there. I felt this was a great story to add a sequel to, since we do not know what happens to the frogs or the boys after the end of the original story. The boys could have continued tormenting the frogs, which seemed somewhat likely. However, I wanted to make the story more positive. Flipping the story around and using it to teach an important lesson was also quite easy to do because of what was already established in the original. This is also the perfect kind of story for my portfolio, which focuses on lessons being learned in stories.

Bibliography. "The Boys and the Frogs" from The Aesop for Children, with illustrations by Milo Winter (1919). Aesop (Winter) Unit