Dumb African Mud Frogs
African mud frogs are pretty dumb when they are hungry. They are so stupid you can catch them with almost anything as bait, if they are hungry and awake. We didn't have much else to fish for, and frog legs were good to eat. We looked forward to Saturdays when we could get permission to go to the dam.
Frogs lived in the black water backed up behind the old dam. The dam was at the narrow neck of the valley so that the dorm cows would have a place to drink. It wasn't much of a pond. The water from a number of small springs followed the overgrown drainage ditches and trickled into the pond from under the marsh grass in the valley. The rotten marsh grass turned the water a dark brown, like strong tea. Since the soil was really black, the water looked black. Sometimes the water became a milky color from the white clay that was used to make the dam because the cows had just been there to drink and had stirred up the bottom of the pond.
The frogs lived down in the mud and didn't have to come up for air very often. I think they hid in the bottom of the deep footprints that the cows made in the clay when they waded in to drink. The frogs had slimy smooth skin that on top was exactly the color of the mud on the bottom of the pond. They were a pale speckled grayish color on the underside. Our teacher said they got air from the water through their skin, but I wasn't so sure about that. The head was the pointed end opposite the legs. They had no neck that you could see. Their little black eyes bumped out on top when they were open but disappeared into the slimy skin when they were closed. They weren't very big frogs; a big one might be two inches long, not counting his legs, but it was the legs we wanted to cook.
When we cut the legs off at the line that looked like a row of tiny brown stitches, our hands became slimy with some whitish junk. The skin peeled off the legs easily, uncovering the white meat. We needed to catch more than 20 frogs to get enough for each guy to even get a taste. We cooked them in a tin can with Blue Band (margarine) and salt. The meat shrunk even smaller as they cooked and slipped away from the bones, but they sure smelled good. The bones were about the size of toothpicks and as white as the meat, so it was pretty hard not to eat the bones with the meat. Getting frog legs to eat was a great way to spend Saturday.
We hoped Saturday would be a hot day so the frogs would come to the top of the water to enjoy the warmth and float on the surface of the water with just their eyes showing. We could usually see the darker shape of the frog just beneath the surface. If the cows had been there and stirred up the water, there might even be lots of frogs that got mashed out of the mud and hadn't yet found a new footprint to hide in.
Even though we had no fishing poles, no line, and no lures, we still planned to catch frogs.