Birdfoot’s Grampa

In the first stanza, the reader meets the old man through the perspective of a first-person speaker, who refers to the car in which they drive as “ours” (Line 2). Through the title, the reader can assume that the speaker is Birdfoot and the old man is Birdfoot’s grandfather. Bruchac deliberately makes the age difference clear at the beginning of the poem to emphasize the experience of learning that takes place in the poem; had Birdfoot been older and more mature, they would already know the lesson they are about to learn, making the whole poem moot.

Bruchac uses hyperbole in the second and third lines to communicate that the stopping and starting has been frequent and to illustrate the impatience of the narrator. They may have stopped only two or three times, but it feels like at least “two dozen” to Birdfoot (Line 3). The toads are blinded, and their blindness is a symbol of their helplessness and dependence on the old man’s intervention when he “gather[s] into his hands / the small toads” (Line 5). The speaker compares the toads as they leap to “live drops of rain” (Line 7) and connects the toads to the natural environment, bringing to life the