Left Undisturbed

Rainy season on the island, five hectares the river keeps deciding about, and somebody's flower pots tied to the trees at a hundred and thirty centimetres, a litre, a third, a tenth, put there for another question, still filling. The males come down every night and say what they say. The females come down every four to seven days, which is a kind of answer too. Between twenty to seven and two in the morning you go round with a headlamp and a tablet in a rubber case, and the rule is simple enough to say out loud: if I know you, I leave you alone. The first time, you're caught by hand. Both eyes, the back, the belly, the hind legs, and back on the bark where you were, and if you were holding someone you'll be holding them again within the hour. After that you're a gold iris crossed with black lines, cropped to a circle, and on the next wet night I hold the screen up to the dark and swipe until your eye looks back from it, and that's it, that's the whole visit: I know you. Go on. Fifty-nine of you the second year, and forty-seven came round again, nine times each on average, like neighbours, like a porch light you could set a clock by. Three of you from the year before. I wrote your numbers down as if I'd met you off a train. The third year it rained the same and the pots were where we'd left them, and I held the tablet up to twenty-three new eyes and every time the library said what a library says to a stranger, which is nothing, which means hands again, the cold of them, the flash. I'd like to tell you they'd all gone downriver, or up into the canopy for good. The paper says turnover, emigration. It also says, because it's honest, that a frog whose eye had changed would look exactly like a frog who'd left, and the only ones we could ever check for changing are the three who hadn't. So I don't know. Somewhere above the lamp the calls start up, one, then the one who answers, and I can tell you're there. I can't tell who.