The Night of the Cane Toads

It was good to be a missionary kid in Melanesia the 90’s and 2000’s. Internet existed, but it was dial-up, pre-social media, and not yet in our pockets. This meant we had the chance to be a bit more creative with our boredom. One way that we did this was by doing our part to maintain a strong culture of pranks among the teenagers on the missionary base.

I have fond memories of toilet-papering different missionary’s houses, launching water balloons at the high school seniors giving rides to girls on their motor bikes, lobbing stink bombs and cough bombs into living rooms full of movie watchers, and causing other (mostly) harmless mayhem of this variety.

On a typical Friday night, many of the junior-highers and high-schoolers, whether base kids or dorm kids, would be out milling around, playing dodgeball, riding motorbikes, or hanging out in small groups. But some nights, especially during breaks when the dorm kids went back to the tribal areas, it seemed like everyone had already made plans, and no one was coming out. The base was dark, quiet, and lonely. One might wander around hoping to find someone to talk to, only to encounter the shadowy local security guards with their bows and arrows, or the ever-present cane toads who would stage a nightly mass invasion of our soccer field and basketball courts.

One quiet Friday night like this, I was out sitting on a cement wall with a couple other boys from my class and two girls. The girls cheerfully announced that they would have to go soon, because a group of them had secured the privilege of using the only hot tub on the base. We couldn’t believe it. Only one house at the far western edge of the base had a jacuzzi, set up under a covered balcony outside. And since this was the only hot tub on the base, perhaps in the entire province, it was a big deal if anyone ever got to use it. Apparently, five or six of the girls from our class had made arrangements, some kind of girls’ night – and we were definitely not invited.

As I recall, they seemed to enjoy flaunting this to some extent, which didn’t do much for the mood of those few of us who would be left by ourselves on a boring Friday night. So, after the girls left, I had the thought of pranking this girls’ night, thereby killing two birds with one stone. We’d find something fun with which to occupy ourselves, and we’d also get some revenge on our female classmates for their ill-advised flaunting.

But what to do for a prank? We knew where they would be and roughly what time they would be there. What sort of prank would rise above the common ones, and go down in the annals of MK prankery as truly worthy? Slowly, an idea formed in my mind. Maybe we could “recruit” the cane toads in our cause.

Cane toads, if you’ve never seen them, are a large, brownish yellow, invasive species of toad that have taken over Australia and Melanesia. They are appropriately warty (being toads) and as I mentioned above, they would emerge at night and hop all around the open lawns and sports areas of our school, looking for bugs to eat. It was all too easy to catch one, or if needed, a whole bucket of them. One just had to watch out for the poison glands, and the toad pee.

We agreed on a plan. We would collect an entire bucket of toads, sneak up on the hot tub, and while our classmates were enjoying themselves without a care in the world – dump the entire bucket of gnarled amphibians into the jacuzzi with them. It would be a lightning sneak attack followed by us immediately melting away into the darkness.

The three of us boys commandeered a large yellow plastic bucket from somewhere and went down to the basketball courts to collect our little coconspirators. It didn’t take long to fill up the entire bucket and soon it was full of a wriggling and hopping mass of cane toads – maybe around twenty of them. They had peed on us quite a few times, but we brushed this off as simply the cost of victory.

Casually and unobtrusively, we made our way all the way across the base, waving at the few people we passed and trying not to smirk when they looked askance at the moving contents of our bucket. Soon we were at the edge of a small field, just across from which stood the gate of the target house, and just beyond that, the wooden lattice that shielded the hot tub. It was perfect. The lattice would block our approach, meaning the girls would have no idea we were sneaking up on them until the very last second.

We snuck across the field and opened the metal gate as silently as possible. The hinges creaked and we froze, considering whether to abort the mission. But it seemed to go unnoticed. We could hear laughter and see movement behind the lattice. Now was the time to strike. We snuck as close as we dared to the lattice – and then we attacked. With a movement that took only a few seconds, we bolted around the side of the lattice, dumped the bucket of toads into the frothing waters of the hot tub, and then sprinted back into the darkness.

As we ran as fast as we could down the dirt roads, we wondered why there wasn’t any screaming. There had been some initial shrieks of alarm as we had shot into view, dumped the bucket, and took off. But after that, there wasn’t the kind of reaction we were expecting. I later found out that we had dumped the bucket so quickly that the girls hadn’t been able to tell what was in the bucket. Some thought it was just some brown leaves. However, soon they started to see and feel big brown-legged things – many of them – moving around in the foamy water. And then the screaming started.

We were halfway across the base when we heard the blood-curdling screams, and lots of them. Feelings of satisfaction and victory mingled with those of alarm as we realized that that level of screaming would probably trigger some kind of response from security. Still, we laughed as we ran. The night of the cane toads would be one those girls would never forget.

We later found out that all but one of the girls had leaped out of the hot tub in terror once they realized it had become the equivalent of the second plague of Egypt. One of the girls, however, who had grown up in a tribal village, stayed in the hot tub and began matter-of-factly plucking the slowly boiling toads out of the jacuzzi. At some point they had all been removed, hopping off into the nearby field, with only a few who had become casualties of the conflict. The girls then got back to enjoying their evening. And of course, plotting their revenge.

For our part, we greatly enjoyed boasting about our triumph for weeks to come and telling the story over and over again. We knew they would try to get us back, but really, what could they do?

One afternoon I came home and noticed that my mom was acting suspiciously. Mildly concerned, I turned down the hallway toward my room and was suddenly greeted by a cane toad, sitting in the middle of the hallway, looking at me condescendingly. I knew this probably meant something bad, so I hurried to my room and flung the door open. Rather than my normal bedroom with its usual high school boy decorations and trappings, I was instead greeted by a suffocating amount of pink – pink everywhere. The walls and the surfaces had been absolutely covered in hearts, girly decorations, and Precious Moments paraphernalia. And in the midst of the barbie-style devastation were two more cane toads. The girls had gotten their revenge, and not only had they recruited toads. They had gone so low as to recruit my very own mother. Touché.

It took an awfully long time to get all that pink out of my bedroom and to return it to its proper masculine state. But even as I cleaned and fumed and plotted how to escalate this vendetta, I remembered the quality of the shrieks after we had successfully completed our mission, and I still felt that it had been worth it. Yes, the night of the cane toads had been most definitely worth it.

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