On the shadowy floor of the rainforest, almost everybody hides.
Moths dress up as bark. Spiders dress up as moss. Whole armies of insects spend their lives pretending to be leaves.
Almost everybody.
Down the trail walked a frog who hid from no one. He was about four centimetres from nose to toes, with a back painted yellow and black and legs of deep, glowing blue. He strolled through the open in the middle of the day, unhurried, like a very small king inspecting his garden.
His colors were a message, and every hunter in the forest could read it: Remember me. Choose a different snack.
That is the promise his kind makes, and it is an honest one. His skin carries poison, gathered bit by bit from the ants and mites he eats. He chases no one. He fights no one. He simply tells the truth about himself, in the brightest ink the jungle owns.
But on this morning, something small was wrong.
In the damp leaves where his eggs had hatched, a tadpole wriggled, and the puddle beside it had shrunk to a spoonful of mud. A tadpole needs water the way a fire needs air.
"Hold tight," said the father.
The tadpole squirmed onto his back and stuck there, snug as a backpack.
Then the father did the thing that still amazes scientists. He climbed.
Up the wrinkled roots. Up the mossy trunk. Higher than the ferns, higher than a house, into the bright upper rooms of the forest, where plants called bromeliads hold little cups of rainwater in their leaves.
He found one and checked it carefully. Empty. Perfect.
Tadpoles of his kind hatch hungry, and they do not share well. So the rule is simple. One pool, one tadpole. Every one of his children gets a private pond in the sky, and he makes the long climb again for each of them.
The tadpole slipped into the cool water and hung there, wiggling.
"Grow," said the father. "I know the way back."
Far below, a bird watched him go. It remembered those colors from long ago, and it flew off to look for plainer food.
People once told a tale that this frog's touch could change the colors of a parrot's feathers. That is how it earned its curious name, the dyeing poison dart frog. The frog has never heard the tale. He only knows the climb, and the promise.
Be exactly what you are, and say it in your brightest colors.
High in the treetops, a tiny pool ripples. Something new is growing there, and its father knows the way.