Picture Dictionary & Books : Free for English Learner!

As soon as the motorcade is past, people push through the barriers and run in the street.

Ben hunches over to protect his precious animals and yells, "Come on! Let's get out of this!"

We go into my house first because I'm pretty sure we've got a wooden box.

We find it and take it down to my room, and Ben gets extra leaves and grass and turns the lizards into it.

He's sure they need lots of fresh air and exercise.

Redskin scoots out of sight into a corner right away.

Big Brownie sits by a leaf and looks around.

"Let's go look up what they are," I say.

The smallest lizard they show in the encyclopedia is about six inches long, and it says lizards are reptiles and have scales and claws and should not be confused with salamanders, which are amphibians and have thin moist skin and no claws.

So we look up salamanders.

This is it, all right.

The first picture on the page looks just like Redskin, and it says he's a Red Eft.

The Latin name for his species is Triturus viridescens, or in English just a common newt.

"Hey, talk about life cycles, listen to this," says Ben, reading.

"'It hatches from an egg in the water and stays there during its first summer as a dull-green larva.

Then its skin becomes a bright orange, it absorbs its gills, develops lungs and legs, and crawls out to live for about three years in the woods.

When fully mature, its back turns dull again, and it returns to the water to breed.'"

Ben drops the book.

"Brownie must be getting ready to breed! What'd I tell you? We got to put him near water!"

He rushes down to my room.

We come to the door and stop short.

There's Cat, poised on the edge of the box.

I grab, but no kid is as fast as a cat.

Hearing me coming, he makes his grab for the salamander.

Then he's out of the box and away, with Big Brownie's tail hanging out of his mouth.

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