Chigwooltz the second, he of the green stone and the patient disposition, was still sitting in the same place.  The sun had turned round; it was now warming his other side.  His all-day sun bath surprised me so that I let him alone, to see how long he would sit still, and went fishing for other frogs.

Two big ones showed their heads among the pads some twenty feet apart.  Pushing up so as to make a triangle with my canoe, I dangled a red ibis impartially between them.  For two or three long minutes neither moved so much as an eyelid.  Then one seemed to wake suddenly from a trance, or to be touched by an electric wire, for he came scrambling in a desperate hurry over the lily pads.  Swimming was too slow; he jumped fiercely out of water at the red challenge, making a great splash and commotion.

Fishing for big frogs, by the way, is no tame sport.  The red seems to excite them tremendously, and they take the fly like a black salmon.

But the moment the first frog started, frog number two waked up and darted forward, making less noise but coming more swiftly.  The first frog had jumped once for the fly and missed it, when the other leaped upon him savagely, and a fight began, while the ibis lay neglected on a lily pad.  They pawed and bit each other fiercely for several minutes; then the second frog, a little smaller than the other, got the grip he wanted and held it.  He clasped his fore legs tight about his rival’s neck and began to strangle him slowly.  I knew well how strong Chigwooltz is in his forearms, and that his fightings and wrestlings are desperate affairs; but I did not know till then how savage he can be.  He had gripped from behind by a clever dive, so as to use his weight when the right moment came.  Tighter and tighter he hugged; the big frog’s eyes seemed bursting from his head, and his mouth was forced slowly open.  Then his savage opponent lunged upon him with his weight, and forced his head under water to finish him.

The whole thing seemed scarcely more startling to the luckless big frog than to the watcher in the canoe.  It was all so brutal, so deliberately planned!  The smaller frog, knowing that he was no match for the other in strength, had waited cunningly till he was all absorbed in the red fly, and then stole upon him, intending to finish him first and the little red thing afterwards.  He would have done it too; for the big frog was at his last gasp, when I interfered and put them both in my net.

Meanwhile a third frog had come walloping over the lily pads from somewhere out of sight, and grabbed the fly while the other two were fighting about it.  It was he who first showed me a curious frog trick.  When I lifted him from the water on the end of my line, he raised his hands above his head, as if he had been a man, and grasped the line, and tried to lift himself, hand over hand, so as to take the strain from his mouth.—­And I could never catch another frog like that.