Rambo meets Bufo Marinus.
I never truly understood the meaning of the word emaciated until the day I saw a hairless dog eating a rotten mango. I'm not one to take pity on stray dogs. My wife Diane does enough of that for both of us, but this dog was different. He was a walking skeleton, less than skin and bones. It was amazing that he was even able to stand, and if that wasn't enough, his right eye was severely damaged and blind. I took him to the house and gave him a raw egg and a little milk.
There wasn't enough meat on him anywhere for a shot. I had to inject the vitamin B12 subcutaneously. He laid down in the sun and slept for six hours without moving. We checked on him once in a while to make sure he was still breathing. At dusk I carried him inside where he lifted his head and ate a little more and then slept all night. It was like he knew he'd been saved, had put his trust in me and said, "My life is yours. Do with it as you please."
He went through several names, but "Rambo" was the one that stuck. Our family is big on sarcasm, but in the end he earned the name. A couple of things distinguished him from your everyday run of the mill canine. For one thing he was a purebred doberman, and judging from the quality of the ear crop and tail dock he must have come from a pretty high class kennel. How he made it to our doorstep is anybody's guess. For another he had eighteen lives, about as many as two average cats.
As well as starvation, he survived a snakebite followed by a quadrupal dose of the wrong snakebite medicine, a full force kick in the head by a cantankerous cow, diving over a cliff head first, being stolen twice, falling out of the rafters of the house while climbing after a cat, getting tangled in the roots of a mangrove tree in a crocodile infested estuary with a rising tide, hanging himself from a jungle vine; you name it and Rambo had tried it. I wouldn't call him suicidal. It was more like he knew that accidental death wasn't in his cards and he couldn't be killed. The word "Psycho" would describe him more accurately.
One day we were vaccinating calves in the corral, when an abrupt shout from one of the cowboys, got everyone's attention. "Aye dios mio, ya el hijueputa tiene la rabia." I looked around in time to see him hurridly scaling the fence. Then I saw Rambo running toward me along the side of the corral, all wild-eyed, snorting and sneezing, foam pouring out of his mouth and flying all over the place with every shake of his head, just like he'd swallowed a double-shot of bubble bath. I went up the fence with the rest of the cowboys. "He'll never survive this one." I thought. "He's finally run out of lives."
Un unexpected burst of laughter brought my head around with a start. My son Chris was doubled over on the ground, near that rabid black doberman, laughing so hard he couldn't talk. Finally, he caught his breath. "That idiot hasn't got rabies daddy. He just tried to eat a damn toad." And so he had. But that was only the first time.
Giant toads have a number of charactaristics in common with Rambo. For starters they have more than one name: giant toad, cane toad, and marine toad, and the scientific name Bufo marinus. They're also slow stubborn learners, appear to be suicidal, and and they show up in odd places.
I read that some computer buff programed a robot toad to do everything real toads do. It only took him 43 bytes of computer memory to do it. (This story text has 8700 bytes.) According to the article, under normal circumstances, toads only act on two different stimulii, both of which are shadows. The programing consisted of a couple of simple "if--then" statements: "If the shadow is large and slow, then run like hell. If the shadow is small and fast, then eat it." You can try this out yourself. Next time you see a giant toad on your porch approach so it won't see your shadow. You will be able to get close enough to touch it, but once your shadow moves across the toad, away it goes.
Back in the early 1980s, the Rambo years, we didn't have electricity at Hacienda Barú. We illuminated our home with candles and kerosene burning Coleman lanterns. With no TV, we usually entertained ourselves in the evenings reading, playing backgammon and watching the toads eat insects in the dim light. It was impossible to keep the toads out of the house, so we didn't bother to try. When there were lots of June bugs, it seemed like lots of toads died. They would squeeze into weird places to kick-the-bucket and we'd have to wait until the stench got so bad that we could home in on it to find them. Local people say that they pig-out on June bugs until they get so bloated that they die.
Once in a while the shadow movement programing doesn't work to the toad's advantage. This usually happens when confronted with a situation that isn't written into the program, like a medium sized shadow moving kind of fast. I once found a toad with a bat wedged into its mouth. Apparently its shadow was small and fast enough that the toad tried to eat it. Since toads don't have teeth, it couldn't tear the bat into pieces small enough to swallow and the bat was wedged in so tight it couldn't be spat out. I managed to remove the bat and both survived. Toads can really take a beating.
On school nights Diane would always take the kids upstairs to bed at 8:00 PM. One night when they went traipsing up the stairs I heard a wet "splat" somewhere on the ground floor. "Did you drop something honey," I called.
"No. Why?"
"Never mind!"
But the next night the same thing happened. This went on for about a week and I didn't think much about it. Then one night, I happened to walk into the kitchen at the same time that Diane and the kids went upstairs. A fast moving medium sized shadow came hurtling across my field of vision and went "splat" on the kitchen floor. I'll bet you've figured this one out. The splat laid on the kitchen floor without moving for about five minutes. I was beginning to wonder if this suicidal toad had finally accomplished its death wish, when it lifted its head, pulled its feet underneath itself and hopped away to one of those secret haunts only toads know. The following night we paid close attention to the stairway, and sure enough, shortly after dark, in the flickering light of the lanterns, that toad, I assume it was the same one, went upstairs one step at a time. And at 8:00 PM, when those large slow moving shadows went up, it did what it was programed to do. Run like hell, and what it wasn't programed to do. Go splat!
It seems that Bufo marinus gravitates toward people and their homes. This is particularly true during the dry season, when they can always count on some source of water, no matter how meager, near human habitations. Drainage water, damp flower pots, livestock water troughs, anything wet will do. They can home in on water like flies on a cow pie. A well drilling company with the H2O divining talent of a toad, would surely be sitting pretty. Back in those days our dry season water source was a hand dug well.
We drew the water into an elevated tank with a gasoline driven pump. No matter how tight the cover on our well, and even with the top of the casing being a meter above level ground, at least a couple of times each dry season our water would acquire a subtle telltale repugnance. That meant it was time to rappel down into the well and scoop out the dead toad before it decomposed completely in the water. That was my job, not my favorite, but somebody had to do it. Later we would pump the well for several hours, throw in some clorox, go to the river to bathe for a few days and bring drinking water in gallon jugs from the neighbors.
Giant toads have few natural enemies, their defense being a toxic substance secreted from glands located on both sides of their necks, the poison is capable of killing large mammals including dogs and humans. Even their eggs and tadpoles are toxic and one case has been reported of two people dying after eating Bufo marinus eggs. Several species of snakes have evolved an immunity to the toxin and can consume toads with no adverse affects.
The toxin is also said to produce halucinations and may have been used in religious ceremonies by indigenous peoples. At one time it became the drug of choice in Australia, a country overrun by cane toads. Knowing that its consumption was impossible to control, the Australian legislature wisely declined to pass a law prohibiting the popular activity of toad licking. I once read a short description by an addict telling of his experience: "Yeah man...... you lick the toad, and then like...... you are the toad."
As you might suspect, Rambo became a toad licking junkie. That day at the corral was his first excursion into the Alice-in-Wonderland world of Bufo marinus. After half a dozen bad trips, he finally kicked the habit, but he never got over the obsession. He reminded me of a dry alcoholic struggling for control when tempted by a whiff of his favorite booze. On those peaceful nights, of reading by flickering lantern light and playing backgammon, if anyone in the family got bored they could alway get a chuckle out of watching Rambo and the toads.
The routine went something like this: Rambo lays with head on front paws, forehead furrowed, eyebrows raised, nostrils flared, staring at toad. Toad twitches. Tremor runs down length of dog´s body. Toad takes two short hops toward a small, fast moving shadow, a long quick flip of a sticky tongue grabs a beatle. An invisible spring releases, hurling Rambo instantly to his feet, at which point he casts a large slow moving shadow. Toad runs for a dark corner; Rambo in a frenzy follows toad, his nose within a pencil-width of touching it. Toad stops. Rambo stops, lays down and stares. The trembling slowly subsides.
The relationship was so intimate, that Rambo would always leave some of his dog food for the toads. Rather than sharing, it was probably that he just never had time to eat it all; there was too much going on for that. Once when he left his whole bowl, his favorite toad over-dosed on dog chow and died. I think our toads got to know Rambo and knew that he wouldn't hurt them. He could lay there for hours almost touching them and they wouldn't pay him any attention, but his shadow would send them scurrying away. Programing is forever if your a toad.
Rambo is long gone, finally being done in by cardiac arrest, but his friends the toads are still around. In the calm of the evening when I hear the rolling stacatto purr of the courting giant toad, I can't help but remember that lovable, psychotic, toad licking doberman that became a legend in the Ewing household.
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