Of Boys And Frogs

My two boys last night brought home a frog from the new neighborhood park in Pinewood.
They smushed him down into an empty water bottle for transport. I'm not sure what kind of frog he was. He looked like one these:
http://www.zo.utexas.edu/research/txherps/frogs/smilisca.baudinii.html
I couldn't extract him from the water bottle by finger, so I used an X-acto knife to behead the bottle and retrieve the frog, which then sat happy and unafraid on my thumb.
The boys wanted to keep him overnight in their plastic bug box, but a lid malfunction made an escape a high probability.
Besides, it was dusk, and froggie needed to go outside and eat.
My youngest, 4-year-old Luke, broke down in tears upon being informed that the cute little bugger was better off outside, where he could get fat and happy on the ungodly amount of bugs that populate our porch after the sun goes down and the light goes on.
To smooth his ruffled feathers, I reached into my bag of boyhood stories and told him and his brother, Curt, 6, the one about the horny toad.
Every summer after I was just a little older than Curt, my dad and I would travel to Brady, which is almost the dead center of Texas, for the annual state muzzleloader championships.
On the first trip, somewhere far west of Austin, my dad pulled over, got out and used his cowboy hat to trap something on the roadside. It was a horned toad.
For the next week, I kept that toad in a Folgers coffee can out there in the unrelenting Central Texas sun. I fed him tomatoes and thought I was doing a great job as caretaker.
However, on the last day in Brady, heat and starvation claimed my toad. I cried half the way back to Houston, and we buried that toad along the road somewhere out there in the Hill Country. My dad tried to explain that the toad was just sick, but I knew better.
After I told my sad story, the boys agreed that the porch would be a better frog home. The porch already is a Woodstock for toads, huge ones that live under nearby rocks during the day and come out to feast on the insects. Some of these guys are almost the size of baseballs.
We put froggie on the wall next to the light, which we then turned on. About a half hour later, just before we put the boys to bed, we went out to check on the frog, which was still hanging out by the light and had a bug leg sticking out of his mouth.
This morning, we checked again, and froggie was gone, most likely co-habitating with those mac-daddy toadies under the rocks.
Hopefully, this lesson to the boys in setting things free - something I'll have to do with them in a dozen or so years - will save a reptile from meeting its fate at the bottom of a seething coffee can.