Storm Toads
Storm toads spend most of their lives asleep in the clay of the basin floors of the Rimward Basins, sealed in against the dry, sometimes for years at a time. When a storm floods a pan they wake all at once, by the thousand, and the noise of their calling carries to the rims. On the Long Pan that chorus is how the camps first know the pan has flooded and the herds can be driven down.
Appearance
A storm toad is round and squat, as big as a child’s fist, with a wide mouth, short legs, and bulging golden eyes set high on the head. Its skin is smooth for a toad, olive or sand-coloured mottled with darker green, and its belly pale. On each hind foot is a hard black spur like a little spade. Out of the clay it is plump and wet; dug up in the dry, it is a shrunken thing wrapped in a thin, papery skin like a bag. A calling male swells his throat into a pale bubble and gives a loud, bleating cry, and a flooded pan full of them sounds like a herd of goats being slaughtered all at once.
Habitat and Range
They live under the floors of the clay pans and the edges of the salt-crust basins, thickest beneath the Long Pan. They spend dry years buried an arm’s length down, and emerge only into the shallow, short-lived water that a good storm leaves.
Behaviour and Temperament
Awake, the toads do everything at once: they call, mate, lay, and eat whatever insects, worms, and shrimp the flood brings, often in the first night. Within a few weeks, as the water shrinks, they dig down again. They are harmless and indifferent to people.
Abilities
A storm toad can lie buried for years without food or water. As the clay dries it digs down backwards with its spades, sheds layers of skin that harden into a sealed cocoon around it, and slows almost to death. The rumble and soak of a storm wakes it; it eats its cocoon and digs up.
Life Cycle
Females lay strings of eggs in the warm flood water, and the tadpoles grow faster than any others, some becoming toadlets in under two weeks, racing the drying pan. Many fail and dry in the mud. A storm toad may live twenty years, most of it underground.
Uses and Dangers
The chorus is a signal: when it is heard from the Long Pan, word goes along the rims and the herds come down to the green fringe of Shortgreen. Rimward children dig sleeping toads out of the dry clay to squeeze water from their cocoons in a bad year, a trick that gives a mouthful and kills the toad. The tadpoles feed the rose waders. The toads harm no one.
Lore and Belief
The kindreds say the toads hear the storm before it is born and call it out of the sky, and in a dry cycle some camps dig a few from the pan floor and set them in a cistern bowl to call. It does not work. Herders say a toad dug up living in the dry is a promise that the pan will flood again in the finder’s lifetime.