I WAS attacked by a frog last week. Well, not so much attacked as accosted. Maybe accosted is too strong a word. OK, so anyway a frog jumped on me.
To be fair to the frog, it was as probably as shocked by the encounter as I was and is writing a column in a newspaper for amphibians telling how it was hopping along minding its own business when it landed on a hippy vegetating in among a cluster of trees.
The cluster of trees is my much loved woodland which I have tended to for the past four years, growing around 200 bare-root saplings into a still-fragile forest on a small neglected patch of a field.
A few weeks ago I'd noticed a trail running from one of the well-established boundary hedgerows, through the long grass and weaving between the trees.
I've seen badgers and hares in the surrounding fields, although suspected it had probably been made by a fox.
At dusk on a clear, and still cool evening, I picked a spot behind a a couple of the sturdier infant birch and settled down to watch.
Although the temperature was dropping a swarm of midges soon began circling and decided to have dinner on me.
But the ways of nature bring such challenges and I kept my position, not wanting to startle anything that might be scanning the land before emerging for a night's hunting.
In an adjoining field I caught a flash of red and white slinking close to a hedgerow, but he headed off up a hill in the opposite direction.
The sky darkened and there was no moonlight, but I was close enough to the flattened trail to see anything that moved along it.
As still as a Zen monk pondering on the sound of one hand clapping, I waited, my eyes fixed on the gap in the hedge where at any moment I expected a pair of paws to appear, followed by a twitching snout.
There were bats in the air and and a murder of crows was settling down, squawking goodnight to one another as if they were a bird clan of Waltons.
A rustling in the grass, and I held my breath – then the sudden sensation of something twitching on my calf.
In a totally un-Zen fashion I jumped back, thinking that it was a shrew or a mouse, hoping against hope it wasn't a larger species of rodent.
Despite the poor light I could see its eyes, peering at me, unblinking among the flattened grass where I had been sitting.
It was motionless, as if hoping that total stillness would make it invisible.
I poked at one of its back legs and off it hopped, well more wriggled lethargically, into the undergrowth and on to the trail snaking through the woodland.
I decided to give up on my stake-out, half imagining a vixen watching me from the hedgerow, shaking her head and motioning to her cubs: "Would you look at the state of that buck eejit."
