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Life starts tough when you are on the tasty bottom of the food chain. Dumpul's fantastic gauntlet began as soon as he was unceremoniously expelled into the water with several hundred brothers and sisters in the form of a soft, juicy, egg mass. From there, he began the slow sit-and-wait process of development in an environment that saw him as only a piece of fantastic froggy caviar. Dumpul was one of the lucky few beads of life that was deposited in the middle of the gooey group. He was relatively safe as his siblings on the outside were slowly nibbled away by the passing aquatic fare. And as he grew larger inside his egg, he gradually became conscious, but still largely oblivious to the blight of anything other than himself.
Only half of the brood developed and broke through the clear membrane of their constricting nursery unknowing and unsympathetic, and filled with the vigor of newborn life. The spring had yielded copious amounts of young tadpoles. They settled into the silt and spread themselves among submerged plant life like a squirming carpet. Some ventured far away from the place of their birth, and most were never seen again. Or one may assume they were never seen again. All of the infant tadpoles had the same, blobby oval body with a dark dappled gray tint that made it impossible to tell one from the other. Dumpul chose not to explore the unknown expanses of murky water. He was content with his lot, and happy to share the abundant decaying carbon matter in the immediate surroundings with his wiggling brothers.
Dumpul developed an unusually close bond with his siblings, and seemed perplexed with their general indifference to his presence. Our young hero was especially disturbed with the high mortality rate of his extended family and lived his early days in absolute terror of being preyed upon. Terror embodied itself in the form of fantastic scaly beasts, with gaping vacuum mouths that could consume legions of the tightly packed nimmo snacks, and sharp beaked, winged giants that absconded with mouthfuls of them into the air.
Name: Dumpul (Duh-Mm-Pull)
Gender: Male
Species: Nimmo
Age: Juvenile
Height: 2 inches
After the miraculous process of metamorphosizing into a froglet, Dumpul remained emotionally bruised and frightfully reticent. He pulled himself out of the water on one particularly sweltering afternoon and was greeted by what he first mistook to be death; but he had not lived so long by staring wide-eyed and pale-faced when confronted with danger. He took to his first instinct and commenced to pathetically hop and scoot his way nearly three feet up a sideways, rotting tree.
For any frog that had been using legs for more than a day, this would be an embarrassing display of complete inadequacy for the gene pool. Dumpul believed it was an Olympic effort and croaked softly in accomplishment.
What Dumpul took for death happened to be not the least bit interested in him up until he had placed himself at her eye level. Nearly 800 pounds of plant/monster/dinosaur/tank couldn't get sustainable energy by eating miniature amphibians; but what fine lady (even ugly fine ladies) could resist such a helpless, sticky, creature? It was at that moment that the monster, formally known as Bell, decided that Dumpul was her property.
He wasn't hard to catch. Ever. So Dumpul came to accept then ultimately enjoy, the company of Bell.
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Adopted
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