I have taken to walking in these woods for hours every day, at all hours. By moonlight and in the bright, leaf-steam glare of noon. It is a separate world, and a refuge, and it brings me gifts every day. I have seen new things, beautiful things, plenty of dead things, too, and no matter how I have gone in, I have always walked out of the place feeling happy and strong. But locking eyes with this frog stops me cold. It brings me down and messes me way up, and as I stand riveted, I can't figure out why.

Things take their own time in fairy tales. It will be three more years and a lot more walking before I suddenly understand what the frog was all about. Three years in the forest, trying to outwalk the past.

These walks have sharpened my eyes and ears. Often I can pick out rabbits, deer and raccoons before the dog spots them, and he is very good. I would never tell anyone that I am proud of this, but I am, even as I mock myself. St. Francis of Bethesda. Dr. Dolittle of the Outer Loop. Walking softly. Taking only pictures. Treading on the sides of my booted feet, just like the Iroquois.

My head is still filled with this sort of thing, back from when I was a kid hauling heavy library books down here to the creek, to read for hours on the sandbars. Indian stories, wilderness tales, dog adventures. The Swiss Family Robinson and The Call of the Wild. Old Yeller and Lord of the Flies.

I am not gliding through the woods like an Iroquois tonight. Not at all. In fact, I am venting, crying, raging. At a new doctor, the latest in a series, who spent the afternoon jabbing thick metal pegs into the muscles of my arms and legs and running electric current up and down my limbs to check the velocity at which my nerves can carry a charge.

Afterward, he agreed with the other doctors. In my 37th year, something bad has happened to my arms and hands, and left them weak and useless as chicken parts. But he knew no more than the others about what had caused the problem. Nor was there consensus on how to fix it, or assurance that it could be fixed.

I am well inside my own bitter cloud when the dog stops short and vaporizes the black squiggles over my cartoon head.

Ever curious, and blessedly oblivious to human self-pity, he has jammed his nose to the ground by the side of the trail. His leash, lashed mountaineering-style around my waist, goes taut and I bounce toward him like a tetherball.

I kneel in the dark to investigate, expecting the familiar: a chipmunk hole, or some cottontail scat, or a dead vole, its tiny gray corpse curled into a furry comma.

But no. It is a frog. A green beauty, damp-skinned and streaked with yellow.

We come close, but it remains frozen on a pad of dead leaves. The only things moving are its eyes, which blink frantically, and its little flanks, which balloon in and out like a small bellows.

I don't understand this. I crouch closer. And then I see the problem: The frog's left hind leg is buried to the second joint in the mouth of a small snake.

It is a common garter snake, about a foot long, barely wider than a No. 2 pencil, with fine stripes running down its sides. Its jaws gape grotesquely, its mouth stuffed with pulsating frog muscle. The rest of its body trails loosely on the forest floor, as delicate and refined as a tendril of a woman's hair.

Now we are frozen too, the dog and I. We stand there for I don't know how long, two giant mammals gazing down at an amphibian and a reptile. The forest seems to have gone completely quiet. The snake, interrupted in its slow assault on a living supper, does not move or give any sign of being disturbed. But the frog is frantic. Blinking. Staring up at me. Breathing hard.

I know there is nothing special in this drama. It is a commonplace event repeated many times each day as part of the forest food chain.

But its violence is shocking, embarrassing, weirdly intimate. It is as if we have stumbled on a pair of lovers having sex in the middle of the trail. And as we watch, I am overpowered by an intense and completely bewildering feeling that I have been here before.

I cannot shake it. It mobs my head like a swarm of bees.

I rifle through the small section of my brain devoted to snake lore. I remember from my younger brothers' boyhood snake tanks that snakes' teeth slant backward, like the spikes that keep people from leaving a parking garage without paying. Equipped this way, the snake is patient and confident. It can keep its clamp-hold for a long time, with little effort, until the frog tires and dies.

The snake is entitled to its supper. The predations of snakes keep the frog population healthy. The only thing that needs doing here, as I know from years of watching "Wild Kingdom," is for me to leave and let nature get back to work. So why do I imagine that the frog's stare is beseeching me? Why do I feel so depressed and helpless at having to move on?

The woods are completely dark now. There is no moon tonight. We gain Bradley Boulevard in time to hear the screech of a car tire, followed by a quick, soft thud and an animal's sharp cry. Then nothing.

We wait, listening in the quiet spaces between the passing cars for the sound of a dog's whimper or a fox's bark. But there is only silence. Whatever has been hit is dazed, dead or long gone.

I don't know what we would have done anyway. I have no flashlight, no phone. You don't tourniquet a wild thing with a denim jacket.

I have been home nearly eight months after many years away. In this awful autumn of 1993, everything around me seems to be wounded and dying. Even in the woods, the world seems surreal and out of control.

(continued on Page Two)