Little Lindsay Ray is afraid of Super Frog. When he comes too close, up in the stands at basketball games, Lindsay begs her daddy to hide her behind his jacket, so that Super Frog can't see her and "get" her. Although I personally think Super Frog and his antics are a fine "Frog spirit" touch, I side with Lindsay, too, remembering my small self at her age, and thinking how I surely would have sought cover from the sight of that otherworldly bug-eyed and gape-mouthed Sesame Street monster, which has become the latest version of TCU's mascot, "the horned frog." Besides, every child, except perhaps my sister, Beth, has been afraid of something. Johnny Greer, who did yard work for us, and whom Beth used to surprise with snakes pulled out of her pockets, was sure she wasn't afraid of the ol' devil himself. But child's fear is not the subject of this essay. A different kind of fear, less overt, is.

I am afraid that little Lindsay and her generation and, certainly, the generations to come, will not know a horned frog. I don't mean not know of it in its anthropomorphic fantasy forms like Super Frog and its predecessor, Addie the Fighting Frog, and the various stylized versions one sees on everything from sweats, shirts, shorts, and stationery, to jewelry, mugs, jugs, and cups. I don't mean not know of it from picture books and museum displays. I mean to really know it "... from childhood up and continuously," as John Graves puts it, "with [the] flavor [of it] in you," the kind of knowing that no amount of reading can produce.

I am afraid that those children of our children will not know the feel of that particular soft, but thorny, lump of life that, if you know where to stroke it right between the anterior "horns" located just above the tiny side-set eyes, will become quiet and frozen in your hand, hypnotized, so that you can loosen your grip and observe it for a few minutes as you would a hand-held rock; will not know how to successfully catch one and gently place it in a shoebox to watch and wonder over in its temporary vivarium until Mother says it is time to let it go; will not know the shish of its sudden scudder in the sand; will not even know to look with hope of finding.

When I was growing up on Rogers Road, on this southwest Fort Worth hill, horned frogs were growing here with me. In those days, there were plenty of them from which to get a lasting "flavor." Endemic to the region, they frequented the neighborhood alleys and vacant lots where tall grasses grew, were found in untouched patches of the college land wooly still with wildflowers and prairie weeds, and we might even have expected to encounter one of the little fellows on the dirt paths that angled in from the campus periphery to and across the concreted walks and the better-kept lawns in front of Old Main, Jarvis, Clark, and Goode Halls. If you knew where and how to look, you could spot one snoozing in the shaded sand, or spy on one at dinnertime, as it hid in the long grasses around a red ant hill or along a red ant trail, selecting its victual victims like Browning's Caliban, letting twenty pass, then striking the twenty-first, "... loving not, hating not, just choosing so."

My most active memories are of an even closer view of the Texas horned lizard, genus Phrynosoma species cornutum, for such is the TCU horned "frog." Because of its broad back and belly that give it the appearance of a toad, it was named thus by early naturalists, and thus it has stuck. My father's early graduate- student interest in the species continued into my childhood years, and I recall especially the backyard pen Daddy built to keep his captives in to study their feeding habits. He offered them ants from an inverted collecting bottle equipped with a glass tube. As the ants "escaped" from the bottle down the tube, the diminutive dragons waiting at the tube's mouth would seize upon them and swallow them down, legs, head, tail, and stinger. I imagined them licking their lips and smiling at their gratis banquet.

Horned frogs could be found all around, and even in, our house, undergoing various stages of scientific observation. My mother tells about a particular confrontation between our iceman and a horned frog that had been placed in the ice compartment of our wooden ice box. Daddy had put him there temporarily to slow his metabolism for an experiment. From the kitchen, Mother heard the deliveryman enter the rear porch where the ice box was kept,open the upper door to the ice storage, and then -- nothing.

Curious as to the silence, she entered the porch area to see the man stock still and apparently speechless, staring at the small beast, just as stock still and speechless, staring back at him from atop the remains of a melting ice block. He vowed he had seen a lot of funny things in his time, but nothing quite like that. I guess it was not the usual kind of provision one kept on ice.

How TCU and the local lizard became connected is by now a familiar story. Addison Clark, Jr., the son of one of the founding Clark brothers of TCU, has been credited with its choice as the school's symbol in 1896, when the university was located in Waco. That year, he promoted the inauguration of a student yearbook, which was to be called The Horned Frog, and which saw its first edition in 1898. The name was picked, so the story goes, because of the abundance of the reptile in the Waco vicinity. It was not until the school had moved to Fort Worth and had established sports programs that the frog became the official mascot of its athletic teams. Had the athletic teams come first, we might have been the TCU Rattlesnakes or some such dangerous prairie dweller, rather than the benign little lizard.

Almost a hundred years have passed since we favored the horned frog with adoption. The way things are going, it won't take another hundred to obliterate it. In another hundred, we will not only have taken its name and form for symbol, but we will have also deprived it, if ever so gradually, of its land,and poisoned its food. Red ant hills and their stinging inhabitants are not a desirable part of urban life, and so, must go.

On a planetary scale, I suppose, the passing of a single Texas species of an insignificant lizard is of pallid importance to the need of man for habitation and cultivation. In spite of that rationale, I can't help fearing for the little Lindsay Rays and wishing for their time, a sure 'nuff, live horned frog to know, instead of some stuffed dinosaur relic of a biodiversified world that has forever passed.

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