From the Archives
A Tale of the Flashlight Frog
Sometimes, you find your cryptid. It can take hours, weeks, and in a few cases, far longer than that. Sometimes you go looking, and other times, it just works itself out to your benefit.
I say this, of course, with one eye missing from my head and an eyepatch over the hole. If I could get my shoe off, you’d see I don’t have any toes on my left foot, either. Because sometimes your cryptid would rather not be found.
At one hundred and three years old, I wouldn’t be using all those toes anyway.
Some stories come to me by way of the telephone game. Someone starts it and passes it on, and it gets a bit altered when it gets to the next person, and so on through a host of hands until it finally makes it to me. When that happens, I have traveling to do—in this case, to the Republic of Cameroon in central Africa. I speak enough French to get by, and they’re friendly people there, even when you start asking about myths and the supernatural.
I met a woman who knew a man who introduced me to Aissatou Hamidou, who took me to meet his friend Emanuel. Emanuel told me about the Flashlight Frog.
I was younger when I met him, though it’s still been years, and I didn’t tell him just how much I knew about cryptids. Some people feel better when they believe they’re educating you, and I was perfectly happy to be educated. I introduced myself as Abraham, and he confirmed he was Emanuel, and we left our last names out of the discussion. Among casters—those who go looking for cryptids—a bit of anonymity is sometimes quite useful. And safer.
We retreated to a hotel overlooking the Sanaga River late in the afternoon, and we ate a supper of ndolé—spinach stew with crayfish and bitter leaves—while we waited for the sun to go down. Emanuel was a social man with a French accent and bright eyes. He was a native of Cameroon who’d never been off the continent, though he knew a great deal about the United States.
He rattled off the names of a good half-dozen cryptids he wanted to come looking for in the States one day.
When he asked me if he could call on me in America one day, I said yes—and I told him my last name and where to find me.
I hope I didn’t make a mistake by not keeping that secret.
Let me tell you Emanuel’s story, the next one I want to share. Only 1,000 to go.
Steady or Flashing: The Lights of the Flashlight Frog
Hear that sound out there on the river? It’s a sound you’ll only hear right here in Cameroon and only right here along the Sanaga. So, listen to it—it sounds almost like a crying child trying to imitate a frog, oui?
But here is the wonder: it is a frog. Come out here on the balcony with me and look down there. Don’t worry; it’s old, but it’s stable enough. See those oil palms growing along the riverbank? Now, do you see the one with the big hole in it right at the waterline? Now wait and watch. Right there. I think you didn’t see that, non?
You did? Amazing.
You are one of the very few I have brought here, up to this room, who could. That is important. In my book, that makes you a special somebody.
C’est bien. Those two small lights you see are the eyes of this frog I was telling you about. The Flashlight Frog, it is called here. Do you know your French? Frog in French is grenouille. This is a feminine noun, so I call the Flashlight Frog “she.”
The length of a pencil, that is how long she is at the most. Just a mbindi, little thing, like an infant, you could say. She looks like any other frog you’ve seen, at least in her color and her shape. But her eyes, they are beams that criss-cross wherever she stares—here we are, farther away from her than you could throw a ball, and you can see her lights still—bugs cannot help but be drawn to them. Then zap!—Oh, I am sorry, did I startle you when I clapped?—she plucks them from the air and eats them.
But she is not that kind of frog. And her lights, you see how they blink in and out—once, they were solid beams, crossing like the guidance you see on an airport runway. Before it happened.
Now, I want to tell you about her and then about a man named Vondou, but you will find people all over Edéa who will tell you my story’s not true. They say she is not real. She’s made up, they say, like the trickster spider Anansi or the story of the Sacred Door. This is because they have never seen the Flashlight Frog with their own eyes, but I always ask them, You have seen oxygen? You have seen the wind? So, how do you know they’re real—because someone told you so? Well, I can tell you: the frog is real. And now that you have seen her lights, too, you know.
Look down there now, all up and down the banks of the Sanaga, now that the sun is almost gone. You may not know what you are not seeing. Fireflies. You will say that they are not native to Cameroon, but they are all over the continent. Ghana, South Africa—and yes, they used to be here, deep in the rainforest, but you see, they are not along this stretch right here. You can paddle a canoe in there far enough, and they’ll light up around you until you think they are the light from the Kribi Lighthouse. But not right here. Non. And that’s because of her.
Back when my father was young, this part of the river was alive with fireflies. I have heard the stories of how children would run on down along the edge of the water, watching for boomslang snakes in the trees and catching fireflies by the score. My grand-mère would give my father a glass canning jar to keep them in. Of course, they can’t live in such a jar for long, so he would set them all free again when the night was over.
The story goes that the Flashlight Frog and her own mama and all their eye-flashing kin appeared among the oil palms before I was grown enough to catch fireflies myself. But my father spoke of them to me; they were a treasured memory for him. So when the frogs arrived, she took to luring insects with those eyes as if she were guiding airplanes to land.
It was around this time that I began to hear about this frog from others besides my father. Some children had seen her, even played with her, and that is how I learned that she was smarter than any frog whose legs make it to your plate. She had feelings, these children said. Like happiness when they came about to play, or anger if they began to scuffle with one another. My friend Aissatou, who was one of the older boys, told me once that she even acted worried when he slipped and fell along the bank, scratching his palms open.
A frog with feelings. Who has ever heard of such a thing? C’est incroyable, oui?
But then, that something I mentioned earlier happened. In truth, three things happened, each one worse than the next. But I will tell them to you in order. And then I have something to show you, if you feel you are brave enough.
The first thing, it was not something I saw, but when I heard about it, it made sense to me. Somehow, but surely by accident, the frog ate a firefly. She had never eaten one before—we older children called it a courtesy, the smaller children said you don’t eat another creature with a light, but either way, she reached out with that long skinny tongue of hers and sucked one up before she could stop herself. Instinct? Who can say? They say it finally lit up just as it passed into her mouth. Oh, she tried to spit it out, but her tongue was very sticky, and the firefly, it could not get free. It made a very sad sound—a little whisper or a whine—as she swallowed it whole.
She cried.
This tiny little creature, who should not have a thought in her tiny little amphibian brain, she cried, and it sounded like a baby was lost out there along the riverbank. Tourists dining at Tchopjem near the water heard it. Soon, the local police took a boat out there. But there was no one to be saved. It was just the Flashlight Frog crying over what she’d done, and by then, she’d become silent, perhaps cuddling with her mama about that accident.
But that was the end of the fireflies here. Overnight, they disappeared along the banks from here down to where the bridge used to be. Look down there—do you see that bog, the island in the middle of the waterway? And can you see beyond it? Those are fireflies. They fled to where the Sanaga is widest, and then the rainforest here went completely black at night. And every night, the Flashlight Frog, she came out and cried. Her eyes would light the sky, and though almost nobody saw her—I could see her, right here from this hotel room where I used to hide—they heard her and told themselves they were hearing the wind on the water.
The second thing that happened was a local named Vondou. A very clean-cut man, movie star looks, but mean as a forest cobra. The best way I can describe him is saying how he once offered a homeless man a ten-thousand-franc banknote wrapped around a rock, then he threw it into the Nyong River. Then he just left—he didn’t even stay to laugh when the old man went into the water for the note and drowned.
Vondou was a braggart, always scheming and scamming with his tall tales. He made promises to make friends, my mother used to say, and broke those promises to be rid of them. But he had his fans, I should say, because when he said he had seen the Flashlight Frog and planned to catch it, a small crowd of people gathered on the docks to cheer him on the night the deed was done. He said she was a mbindi, a tiny little thing, and he could handle catching a myth. He shook hands and stood for pictures. Then he climbed down into his canoe.
Someone handed him his gig pole.
If he’d known what was going to happen, Vondou would have taken a three-prong spear, but his gig only had the one prong. The Flashlight Frog was so small, I’m sure he thought three would be overkill or perhaps even wouldn’t work at all—the prongs might’ve been too far apart. She could have slipped right between them. With a single prong, he could spear her straight through, as the fishermen who hunt for frog legs do.
It was as clear as a glass sky that night. No clouds, a waning moon overhead, and calm waters as he paddled out. He had a headlamp, so his admirers could keep track of him for a time until he disappeared among the oil palms and the mahogany trees and the moss and the weeds and the rainforest dark. I watched him from up here, sitting just where you are. My feet were up on the rail. By then, I’d seen the Flashlight Frog for myself, very close to it, and I knew nobody else had. I did not think Vondou would see her. And if he did, she’d probably use witchcraft against him. He would come back with a curse that would cost him those good looks of his or something like that.
It was after midnight, and I had drifted off to sleep when I heard her scream. Shrill, piercing right down to the bone, the kind of sound that gave you your own kind of pain and made your muscles tighten, clenched in terror.
She screamed two more times, and then the whole rainforest went dead silent. I was standing stiff at the railing, squinting and staring, afraid of what I might see and afraid of what I might not see.
A shadow slipped out of the trees. Then his headlamp came on again.
I thought perhaps I would go down on the dock and wait for Vondou to come ashore. His supporters had long ago gone home to bed; I would be the only one. When he reached me, I would extend a hand to help him out of his canoe, and then I would slam him back into the water as hard as I could, send him chasing an imaginary banknote, and hope he would drown. I was trembling. My knuckles were white on the railing.
That was the moment when I could see the blinking lights at the edge of the tree line, drifting forward from the rainforest to the river’s open water. He had hurt her, I knew—her lights could not hold steady anymore. But she lived, and I was thrilled to know she had escaped him, but I was terrified that she had come after him instead of disappearing deeper into the rainforest.
Vondou was obviously surprised to see her. He was nearly halfway across the Sanaga on his way back to the dockside when he saw her blinking lights criss-crossing the darkness. He stopped, and I could just see his gig pole as he used it to turn his canoe back around to face her. She was perhaps 60 meters from him, maybe fewer.
And then came the third thing.
Have you ever heard of frog’s breath? It is fine if not, as most people don’t know it. It is another way to describe a thick fog. When Vondou turned around to go after the Flashlight Frog again, the frog’s breath rolled in from nowhere. I told you there wasn’t a single spot of weather when Vondou set out, but now there was a billowing fog coming down the river, rolling in and blanketing both shores. The trees turned to gray shadows and disappeared. For a moment longer, I could see the frog’s flashing lights, and then she was gone, too. All that was left was a single tiny beam of light coming from Vondou’s headlamp.
He must have heard it before I did because his beam skimmed the water surface as he stumbled to stand up in his canoe and whip around to face what was coming. A wave, I would say ten feet high, rushed out of the frog’s breath, lifting his canoe up until it looked as if he were levitating. His headlamp bounced around as he fell back into the canoe and struggled to his feet again. He jockeyed to face where the wave came from. Perhaps if he had shut that headlamp off, things could have been different for Pierre Vondou, rest in peace, imbécile.
I could see her for no more than seven seconds. But it was enough. Her own great lights were the first thing I saw coming out of the fog. They blazed like lighthouses. They were followed by a massive maw and a tongue the size of surfboards laid end to end. The Flashlight Frog’s mama leaped at Vondou; his headlamp was her target. When she slapped him with her tongue, I could hear the sound all the way up here in this room. It was the sound that Velcro makes when it tears. Vondou screamed high-pitched and rose up into the air. For just a breath, he was there, floating like an insect stuck to paper, and then he was gone. Most of him was gone, anyway—she took him in headfirst, all the way up his knees. As she fell back into the water again, causing great waves on both sides, I could see his feet twitching. Maybe he thought he could free himself by kicking. Maybe it was just the last reflex of a human fly.
She vanished into the water then, her back arching up out of the water like—
Ah. Yes, that’s right. It’s gone. The bog out there, that little island out in the waterway, the one I pointed out earlier. You might not have noticed, but the Flashlight Frog has been dark and quiet for the last hour, and when she goes to sleep, Mama Flashlight Frog disappears like a submarine as well, slipping away into the river’s waters until her baby brings her lights back around again. Most people don’t see her, either, but you did, didn’t you?
Come back in here. Let me show you this. I found this book after I saw the Flashlight Frog for the first time. I hadn’t thought about that light again until I stepped into a very small bookstore in Douala, not far from the train station, and there it was. It was on a shelf in the back, above my head, but I knew it was meant to be mine. Every other book on that shelf was covered in dust, but not this one. It was immaculate. And I could feel something that made my face feel warm, a rush of blood you can get when something brings you joy you didn’t know was possible.
They didn’t even know what to charge me. The young man at the counter just looked it over, opened it, closed it up again, and said, “Two thousand francs.” Three dollars. I’d have paid a hundred times that, if he had said so. It was as if I’d found some prized possession from when I was a child, something I’d lost but waited a lifetime to get back. I came back to this room, and the world was blur; I didn’t remember the train ride when I let myself in an hour later.
On the floor, just inside the hallway over there, someone had slid an envelope under the door. No note, no explanation, just an envelope—and it had three cards inside. Blank on one side, a logo I’d never seen before on the other. But touching them, I felt the same way I had felt when I’d seen the Flashlight Frog’s eyes in the darkness for the very first time, how they just appeared and filled me with surprise and excitement because I knew they were something important and special. These cards, they were warm to my touch.
I never found out who they came from, but I knew they were given to me because I saw the frog that nobody else did. That tingling anticipation in holding the cards was the same one that came after seeing her lights the first time. I felt as if these two things had a relationship, like when you smell something wonderful baking and then you are suddenly hungry when you weren’t just a moment ago. Something opened up for me.
You see, long before Vondou went hunting her, I went looking for the Flashlight Frog myself. I hired a canoe and a paddle. And I took the cards and the book with me.
Have you ever taken a video with your phone? Well, what if when you did that—when you made a movie of your mother blowing out the candles on her birthday cake and smiling at you—and then when she went home, you played the movie on your phone, and your mother just stepped right out of your phone? Oh, of course, she is still at her home eating sliced leftovers of that cake, but she is also right here, right now, solid and real, next to you, talking to you as if she never left. And when you turn the video off, she just goes away again—but you can bring her back anytime you play the movie again.
That is this card. Watch what happens when I cover it with my hand.
No, no. Don’t do that. You don’t need to be afraid. You see how small she is? I can hold her in my hand. She is not at all hard to handle, no matter what might have happened with Vondou. This is not really her; this is what I came back with after I went into the rainforest to find her. That feeling I felt that called me to look for her—it led me to acquire her presence in this card, like a living movie I can call upon anytime I like.
This is the Flashlight Frog, if you know the stories.
And because you can see her too, you might find a book like this of your very own. And if you do, you come back here to find me. I’ll give you one of my cards and take you to find the Flashlight Frog, if you want to. I don’t mind. And besides, I will still have one card left after that, and I have been thinking I know where I might be able to get more.
After we find the Flashlight Frog with your card, perhaps you can come with me to help me use my third card.
You see, the Mama Flashlight Frog’s out there in that rainforest as well.
I just think that she will be a little harder to handle.
