When the kids I was going to school with were rubbing turpentine on dogs testes and putting duct tape on cat’s paws, I tried to help or set the animals free, if i could. I don’t brook torture to animals, I don’t believe they deserve it. If I’m going to kill an animal to eat, I kill it dead, and I kill it fast.

Amphibians, on the other hand, weren’t warm and furry and while I didn’t ever set out to injure one, it didn’t occur to me to be concerned if someone did.

V-man is having some concern with frogs, and it brought this little episode of my life to mind.

IN around 1972, just as I’d become a teenager, I was visiting my uncle’s farm in southern illinois. Plan was we’d spend two weeks there, relaxing, eating my uncles excellent strawberries, fishing. My cousin and I had rummaged through a nearby dump to find enough pieces to throw together a pair of functional (if ugly) bicycles, and a lot of inner tubes that had seen better days.

One warm evening we were sitting around playing with the inner tubes trying to find a pair that had a few more miles in them, and came up, quite literally, flat.

Danny and I decided, hell, these are just like giant rubber bands, and started stretching them out until they nearly snapped, and found they were remarkably more resilient than we had supposed.

The next morning, we searched through the wooded area behind the farm, and cut a nice Y shaped slingshot.

About twelve feet tall.

We trimmed off branches and dragged it to the edge of the property, got a posthole digger and planted this big “y” in the ground, with the top of the forks at about eye level. A chunk of leather from a thresher belt, and a couple of leaky inner tubes later, we have a slingshot from hell.

Dirt clods were our first ammunition, and we found that we could fling a fist sized clod nearly 350 feet to the county garage down the street. Apples (there were always plenty on the ground rotting) and firecrackers followed, nothing quite as satisfying as getting the fuse timed just right so it would explode in midair showering the field with rotten applesauce.

This occupied us for hours. Hell, days. We stopped only to catch frogs, and catch them we could, because in the stream on the edge of Uncle’s property, there were frogs by the thousand. We caught frogs because we could put them in the grass around the yard, and they’d eat their weight in mosquitoes in short order. Their croaking at night is a great childhood memory.

We’d had the slingshot set up several days, when Danny got the idea, hey, let’s move it to the edge of the field along the highway. We flung rotten apples at cars, an egg or two carefully placed would coat a windshield with incredible speed, even a fresh deposit from Butch, the family basset hound, managed to hit the decklid of an old plymouth.

Late at night, we decided, we’d sneak out of the bedroom window (we were supposed to be sleeping) and run up to the slingshot and do some nighttime sniping. We managed to shower a couple in a convertible with rotten applesauce, thanks to a late-discovered stash of fireworks, and a couple of potatoes actually knocked off a wheelcover or two.

We were starting to get tired, and decided we’d launch one more big attack, and sneak back into the house. Danny was saving the best for last, brough out a genuine M-80, and we looked around for something to put it in.

To my merit, it was Danny that first grabbed a frog, prized it’s face open, and jammed the m-80 far enough down it’s gullet to leave only the fuse sticking out.

I stood on top of the little rise separating the field from the highway and waved at Danny to light the fuse, and dove for cover when the headlights pointed my way. Danny let go, and the frog sailed through the air (You may not know this, but a frog can scream) and over the rise. The consequent explosion, and the screeching of tires, made us run like we’d never, ever run before. We managed to get to the house to see my parents and danny’s mom sitting at the kitchen table getting ready to play canasta with my uncle when he returned from his evening job at the bank.

We were still sitting there in the grass behind the well pump, when my uncle walked into the kitchen from the front of the house; he was covered with blood and everyone jumped up to see what was wrong. He waved them down, his eyes wide, and explained. “I was driving back home along route 14, had my windows open because it was so nice. Just got alongside the farm, when a frog jumped in my passenger window, looked at me for a minute, and blew up.”

Danny and I, unable to reach far enough to climb back into the bedroom window, slept in the garage under my uncle’s old Studebaker till morning, and crept into the house and into bed before we could be discovered. It didn’t help, we were found out fairly early that morning and had our hides tanned with never before equalled vigour; the fact that dad couldn’t stop laughing between hits with his old razor strop and my uncle laughed until he cried while he used the pull strap for the Gravely on Danny, makes it all worthwhile, now.

V-man, get yourself a couple old inner tubes….