Kate wasn’t paying attention. She walked over to the frog, and stuck out her hand. “I’m Kate, and you are?”
“Frog seems to do nicely.” Frog rocked back a bit and reached Kate’s index finger with its own little fivefingered hand. Except for a little webbing, leopard frog hands look quite human, I found myself thinking. Finger and hand moved up and down in a dignified simulation of a handshake.
“Glad to make your acquaintance.” Then she bent over and kissed Frog’s head, and laughed. “I’ve always wanted to do that. I wish I could stay to talk, but I have business. Kim’s waiting.”
“Another time, perhaps,” Frog replied.
“My pleasure.” Kate gave me that sincere, open look again. “Ellie told me about your family; she’s got a lot of grit. We’ll be in and out of Bar Harbor tonight. You know the boat.”
I gave her my best noncommital response. She gave me a quick smile and bounced out through the front office door. It closed so slowly that a momma mosquito could fly in, brood in my test tank, and her children fly out before it locked them in. I stared until the sound of it crashing shut brought me back to my senses.
“Could I come and watch Kate dance?” Ellie asked.
“That,” I chuckled, “I think, would be alter your bedtime.”
We didn’t head out for Brainerd and Paul Bunyan until two. An Evinrude came in with a carburetor problem; I replaced the fuel filter, and ran Gumout through it until the problem went away. A family limped in to dock with a methane-air fuel cell Merc Electric which had cracked the cork on its liquid methane dewar. I was able to match the threads with an LPG plug I had lying around, drill holes to fit the rest of the hardware and got them on their way. Next, against my better judgment, I patched the hull on a teenager’s jet ski with some superfiber and heat-dried it solid—the customer was in too much of a hurry for a fifteen minute sand-and-glaze, so he took it as was on a discount.
Then the front office was empty, so I consulted my internal Worst Case Scenarios service and set my “back-at” clock to five p.m. So, Frog, Ellie, and I were off in my old jeep down the highway, windows open, our hands diverting as much of the eighty-eight degree slipstream to our sweating bodies as possible. Off the lake, it was a scorcher with that kind of heavy before-the-storm feel. The forecast for the Fourth had been hot, muggy, and partly cloudy last I looked, but I began to get a feeling…
Ellie carried one of Terri Ann’s old bags that was big enough for Frog to hide in. It made her look older and that made me notice the way she was starting to fill out her T-shirt, which started me thinking that I should ask Marie to talk to her about wearing something underneath the next time we stopped in for crepes. Ellie was still a month short of her eleventh birthday and I thought I’d had another couple of years before I had to really start worrying about that kind of thing. But she was about five two already, and clearly running a little ahead of her age in all respects. It could be worse; the Ender kid had managed to get pregnant at twelve.
“Grandpa, did you hear what I was saying?”
“No, Ellie, sorry. I was lost in thought.”
“I just told Frog about all the Paul Bunyan legends, digging the Grand Canyon and everything, and he said if Paul’s a real robot, he might be able to do things like that. That would explain a lot, wouldn’t it, if Paul Bunyan were a big robot?”
I laughed. “Yes, if he were a robot, it just might explain a lot.”
It was a zoo when we got there. We checked with the Olsen’s answering machine from a pay phone, and it said they were still out, so we started wandering around the central square looking for a seven-foot guy with a beard. Turned out, there were a lot of big people around. The biggest, of course, was Paul, a twenty-foot animated giant sitting in a huge logframed stage next to a monstrous blue ox.
I lifted Ellie up on a fence post so Frog could peek out of the hand bag and get a good view without attracting too much attention.
“Possible target entering the lumber museum,” Frog announced.
He had better eyes than any human-made robot I’d ever heard of. I spun my head around and caught a glimpse of a big guy in a lumberjack shirt disappearing into the entrance of the huge log shed that housed the old-time lumberjack exhibits. So I lifted Ellie and Frog down and headed through the crowd towards the entrance. It took us a couple of minutes, and I thought I saw someone who looked like Olsen outside the museum two or three times, but I wasn’t sure.
The museum was crowded. In addition to all the nineteenth-century logging equipment, there were all sorts of cheerfully unecological murals concerning Paul Bunyan and his Blue Ox laying waste to the forests of North America, and various cheap ceramic sculptures of this or that having to do with Paul’s mythical entourage.
“Ahem,” Frog said softly, peeking out of Ellie’s bag. “Could you set me up on the shelf next to that china blue ox where I can get a view? I can pretend to be ceramic and fit right in.”
One of the people next to me looked around, puzzled. I smiled at him, he nodded and went about his business. I sidled back to the wall near the shelf, and when I thought no one was looking, I put Frog up on the shelf.
After a minute or two, Frog told us, as softly as he could, “It looks like he’s not here.”
“Momma! A talking frog!” shouted a sun-bleached blond boy who looked to be about six. “Who are you, Frog?”A curly-haired woman in a bright orange muumuu, who might have missed a session or two with Jenny Craig, turned and stared at Frog.
“I heard,” Momma answered. “Isn’t that cute?” She waddled up to Frog’s perch and poked at it with the red lacquered nail of her index finger. “Ugh, it feels real. What is it?”
“Ahem,” said Frog. “I am one of the frogs that got caught in the lumberjacks’ throats in the winter of seventy-eight.”
The woman stepped back, and a couple of other people turned around. There was no chance to grab Frog and run.
“It got so cold and miserable,” Frog continued, “that everyone had a frog in their throat because it was much too cold for us frogs to be outside of people’s throats. Paul saw that all this difficulty in speaking was getting in the way of cutting down trees, so he took his big kettle, the one that could make a thousand cups of coffee for a thousand men, and filled it full of snow. Then he chopped down a hundred trees to fire it, shoveled in more snow as it melted, and boiled a ton of water.”
“I get it,” the boy said. “It’s got a switch under its skin; you poke it and it talks!”
“Then,” Frog resumed in a stentorian voice that made interruption unthinkable, “Paul poured the hot water into a big frog pond near the camp, and it melted the ice and made the water so warm, that all the frogs forgot it was winter and hopped out of people’s throats and into the nice warm pond.
“Of course, the pond froze again, freezing all those frogs before they could hop back into people’s throats again. But it turned out that when spring came and everything got unfrozen, the frogs thawed and didn’t mind having been frozen that much. After all, encased in ice, there was no danger that they would be swallowed and eaten, which is the sad fate of many a frog-in-the-throat. So, that’s how we frogs learned how to hibernate.”
“How charming!” the little boy’s mother exclaimed. “Even if it is icky.”
Frog got poked again, and had to repeat the story over and over, trapped in its cover role. In the meantime, we weren’t getting any closer to finding Thor Olsen, and my worst-case scenario estimated return time of five P.M. was beginning to look a little shaky. I had visions of some family whose outboard wouldn’t start, and had to get down to an island in Wilson’s bay before sunset or lose a three hundred-dollar deposit on a cabin waiting desperately at my door, watching their vacation tick away and getting madder and madder.