Amphibian (12 page)

I figure we're going to need a lot of herpetologists since there are about 5,700 different species of amphibians and according to
the Red List of Threatened Species 32 percent of them are threatened with extinction.

Actually, I don't really like thinking about this … but maybe I should have a backup job just in case by the time I'm an adult the only place you can find a frog is in a museum.

In the morning Grammie and I walked on the crunchy snow in the woods. We found the spot where Granddad and I put our time capsule. The summer before Granddad got sick and died, he and I filled up a plastic box with things that would remind us of what we were doing when we dug it up in about ten years. We put in a picture of Granddad and me both wearing big sun hats and birds pecking the seeds off the rims. We sat really still while Mom took the picture. The other things we put in the time capsule were:

1. a lavender bath ball

2. a Canadian loonie with the year's date on it

3. a piece of string as long as I am tall

4. my handprint on some clay we found by the river

5. the ticket stubs that were in my mother's purse from the Harry Potter movie she and I saw that summer

6. apple, cucumber, pea, pumpkin and squash seeds, just in case.

I also put in a letter I wrote to my future self. At first I wasn't sure what to write so I asked my mother. She said how about ‘Dear future Phin, are you still sleeping with your mother?' I told her that wasn't funny – especially since back then I slept with her a lot less than I do now. I can't remember exactly what I did write, but it said something like ‘Dear future Phin, I am writing this as your eight-year-old self. I hope that by the time you dig this up, species like tigers, apes and polar bears are still walking free someplace on the planet. And I hope you have saved at least one species from going extinct. If you haven't, you'd better work harder. Yours sincerely, back-in-the-past Phin.'

The time capsule is under a big pine tree in the woods. I know exactly which tree it is because it's the one beside a rock as heavy as my mother, which nobody is likely to be able to move without the help of a big machine. My grandmother said we don't have to worry about anyone moving it while she's still here. She's sixty-five and the average life expectancy of a woman is about eighty so I'm super, to-infinity hoping I won't have to dig it up for a lot more years.

Seeing where the time capsule is buried made me think of that picture of me and Granddad frozen in time. I imagined that inside the time capsule, my grandfather is alive. He's sitting reading the newspaper in the garden and drinking his favourite tea. After a while, he tips back in his chair, folds the newspaper over his face and has a nap. I'd rather imagine him in that box frozen in time than in that other box. Every time I think of that other box, I get a really awful feeling in my stomach.

I'm wondering if when future Phin opens the capsule and sees that picture, will he feel sad? Part of me worries that he won't and if that happens, then that means he'll have forgotten Granddad. I think I'd rather he be sad than to forget.

I had an awesome time skating on the river! Mom, Grammie, Uncle John and I got a big sheet and we held on to the edges. The wind caught the sheet and whipped it up into the air like a big sail and it made us go faster and faster down the river. It felt like we were flying. To the gulls way up in the air, we must have looked like a big floating swan.

We skated till we came to a place on the shore where there was a big log where somebody once had a bonfire. We sat down and rested for a while. While Mom, Grammie and Uncle John were talking, I lay flat on my stomach and looked down into the ice. It was as clear as glass and I could see the eel grass frozen on the bottom. I imagined that I was floating above the water. It felt like magic.

If I had a superpower, it would be in a magic potion that I would swallow to make me grow gills for the water. The gills
would stay at the sides of my head until I went back on land and then they would disappear. I would have the ability to swim and breathe underwater like a fish and I would be able to understand the language of all the ocean mammals. I would talk to the dolphins and we would figure out how to save them. I would be their human who would go up to the surface and carry out their plans.

Some scientists spend their whole lives studying dolphins – which are mammals like humans and not fish – to see if they're as intelligent as humans. They've found that dolphins can talk to each other and that they even gossip about one another. Each bottlenose dolphin has her own name, which is a certain pattern of whistles and clicks. Sometimes a pair of dolphins will use the name of another dolphin when she isn't around. Dolphins also have meetings where they all stand on their tails in a circle and take turns talking. Nobody knows what they're talking about, but I bet part of it is trying to figure out if humans are as intelligent as dolphins.

It took us a lot longer to skate back to Grammie's house than it took us to skate down the river. That was because the wind wasn't blowing the right way to help us with our sheet sail and so we had to fold it up and put it in Grammie's backpack. I only fell once on the way down the river but I fell three times on the way back. But it didn't hurt very much because Grammie gave me a small, thin pillow to put in between me and my snow pants.

When we got back to the house, my mother went to have a shower and I helped my grandmother make lunch. Then right afterwards, we had to leave to drive back home. Mom and I each gave Grammie a big hug goodbye. Grammie said, ‘See you next time, my little frog.' She looked so sad – like how a mother elephant on the Green Channel looked for weeks and weeks after zookeepers took her baby away to put in another zoo.

On the way back home, I saw thirty-one graveyards.

I think my mother was sad when we got home. Visiting Grammie without Granddad there still feels so weird. And I just don't know what to do about that feeling called sad. People keep telling me to remember all the good times and the happy and worthwhile things about my grandfather. What I want to know is where all that good stuff goes when somebody dies. It's not like it's in a bottle someplace.

I asked my grandmother about that and she said that it's in me and my mother and everyone whose life my grandfather affected – little bits of him are everywhere. So I guess that makes us all a bit like bottles.

Bird and I talk about dead people sometimes. Just after my grandfather died – which was almost exactly fifteen months ago – Bird's aunt died. She died in a car accident and Granddad died of cancer. What we both don't know the answer to is once you're in Heaven, do you get stuck wearing the clothes you were buried in for eternity?

I asked my mother about this since she believes in Heaven, and she said she didn't think so because Heaven likely wasn't a material place like earth. She said she thought nobody there would even see a person's clothes if they had any on. People would only see another person's true self, who they were on the inside.

Bird asked his mother the same question and she said they might wear those clothes for eternity but nobody would be worried about that kind of thing in Heaven. But Bird said that his mother and his aunt's husband spent a long time thinking about what his aunt should be dressed in after she died. They finally picked a purple dress because her favourite colour was purple. I sure hope she really, really likes purple if she has to wear that dress for all of infinity.

After Granddad died, my mom reminded me of the saddest example of sad that Jane Goodall said she ever saw. It was when a fifty-year-old matriarch chimp died. Her eight-year-old son sat beside her body, taking her hand in his and whimpering. He wouldn't eat, wouldn't do anything, just like my mom after
Granddad died. I was really super worried then because I knew that after three weeks of not eating, that child chimp died too.

At Granddad's funeral, my mom reminded me of great apes and bears and moose and antelope who won't leave the dead bodies of their family. Her friend Jill couldn't pull her away from Granddad's casket.

This evening, I painted my mom a picture with watercolours. Her favourite garden flower is bee balm, which looks like a crazy alien flower, maybe from Venus. So I painted a picture of her wearing a red bee-balm necklace, like the leis people wear around their necks in Hawaii.

My mom likes my paintings. So far I've given her seven and they're all hanging all along one wall of her study. The one I like the best is of her with her long hair piled on top of her head into the shape of a bird's nest. Inside the hair nest, I painted four little blue robin's eggs. I liked her hair better when it was long like how she looked when I painted that one. Now it's short and in my painting she looks like a crazy bee-balm flower herself. But I likely won't tell her that.

After the painting was dry, I wrapped it in tissue paper and brought it up to my mom, who was working at her desk. She looked up at me and said, ‘What's this?' in an excited and surprised voice.

‘Just something I made for you,' I said.

‘Thanks so much, honey. What's the occasion?'

‘I don't know. I just wanted to make something for you,' I told her.

After she unwrapped the painting and saw what it was, she smiled super big.

‘This is absolutely gorgeous, Phin, thank you!' she said. Then she pulled me toward her and gave me a big hug and a kiss.

I helped Mom decide where to hang the new painting. As she hammered the nail into the wall, she turned sideways and for a
split second, just before she turned back to face me again, I saw a glimpse of Granddad on her face.

This made me think that maybe Grammie's right – maybe there are little bits of him everywhere. I just wish they'd all come back together, just like in a movie I once saw where a bunch of leaves swirled up off the ground and formed into the shape of a dead person. That would be a little freaky at first, but a grandfather shaped out of leaves would be better than no grandfather at all.

Bird and I figure that as soon as we get a hold of Cuddles, we can call the Frog and Tadpole Rescue Group in Australia, and they can help us figure out a way to get him back there. We decided we don't have any choice except to take him. We have a plan for that. We even named our plan. Bird suggested Mission Impossible but I didn't like the Impossible part. So I suggested Amphibian Eco Restore, which Bird said sounded too geeky. So we ended up combining part of his name and part of mine, which made it Mission Amphibian. Mission Amphibian will take place in different steps. These are the steps:

1. The rescue will take place during Wonderful Wednesday art class while everybody is painting and gluing. We decided on this day because the fumes from all those paints and glues will make people more confused than they normally are.

2. I will poke lots of holes in my lunch bag that morning while my mother is in the shower.

3. At 2:50, just before art class ends, Bird will create a diversion by knocking over the jar of water with all the paintbrushes stuck in it.

4. While Mrs. Wardman is helping Bird clean that up (and likely being mad at Bird who says that won't bother him because he's used to it), I will take Cuddles from the aquarium and walk quickly to my
cubby. I'll put him in my lunch bag, where he will be all right until I get him home.

5. I'll put Bird's fake frog in Cuddles' place. The fake frog is brown and Cuddles is green but we figure nobody will notice because of all the fumes.

6. By the time I do this, the bell to go home will have rung.

7. Bird will steal Cuddles' jar of food and put it in his pocket. We want to make sure we have the right food for him because when a frog eats something that's not good for him, he might throw his stomach up so that it's dangling out of his mouth and then wipe it off with his right front leg. That's not something Bird and I want to see.

8. Bird will come home with me, and he and I will pretend to my mother that we want to play in my bedroom.

9. We will put Cuddles in a big box where he'll be okay until we know what to do.

10. We will sneak the cordless phone out of Mom's bedroom and call the Frog and Tadpole Rescue Group in Australia for instructions as to how to get Cuddles to them. We won't call them beforehand because if my mother sees that strange number on the telephone bill, our plan will be foiled.

I am really excited about our plan and nervous at the same time. To calm myself down, I wrote some in my Reull book. The Gorach leaders have a problem. Some of the Bothersome Gorachs are saying that the other creatures of the planet have souls too and maybe Gorachs shouldn't put them in cages and kick and poke and tease them. They've shown pictures of animals looking like they're in a lot of pain as they're dying, and bright lights floating up into the air after they've died. Some of the ordinary Gorachs are also starting to believe that the other animals really do have souls. So the Gorach leaders have told the Gorach scientists who work for them to prove that this isn't true.

To do this, these scientists invented a machine that when you step on it, it measures your total weight. Then it measures the separate parts of the body like the bones, skin, organs and blood. Then the machine adds all those body parts together and subtracts that amount from the total amount of the body. Whatever is left over is the weight of the soul.

The scientists' first guinea pig for the machine was a Plubber. A Plubber is something like the elephant here on earth except it has three trunks – one for eating and drinking, one for protection and one for hugging other Plubbers. Because it has three trunks, it can do all these things at the same time, which makes it very efficient.

The Plubber that was the Gorachs' guinea pig was called Kloop. He had lived in a cage exactly his size – not a millimetre bigger or smaller – for seventy years. Every day hundreds of Gorach children visited Kloop's cage to poke and laugh at him. These days he uses his trunks mostly just to cover his face.