TAHLEQUAH — A little frog sitting in her pond during a desert dry spell couldn’t make it rain, no matter how hard she tried or how loud she sang.

But when the frog enlisted the help of other animals, ranging from birds to insects to coyotes, to appeal for rain, they all received the shower they needed to keep them alive.

Storyteller Fran Stallings, of Bartlesville, emphasized the interconnectedness of all life as she kept children entertained with true and tall tales during the summer reading program’s final story hour Tuesday at Tahlequah Public Library.

Her knowledge, and interest, in nature is no accident. Stallings holds a Ph.D. in biology, but has been a professional storyteller since 1982. She employs her voice and her graceful hand movements to illustrate a flying bird, a cud-chewing cow, as she weaves her tales.

“My mother says I’ve been telling stories ever since I could talk,” she said before the program.

“I have some stories for you today that are about water, and especially about rain. Rain is very important,” she said.

The water theme followed the motif of this summer’s reading program, with its slogan “Make a splash at your library.” Some of the children clutched the plastic inflatable toys they had earned for their participation in the program, as Stallings began her first tale.

She taught them a song, using American Sign Language, to illustrate the point that the rain comes down on us all — the big and the small, the rich and the poor. Ditto with the sunshine and a baby’s smile.

“These signs are very useful in storytelling,” she told the children, as she explained how people who cannot hear use them to communicate. “It’s also very useful for communicating through plate glass windows.”

After the song came the morning’s first story – about how the rainbow, as we know it today, came to be.

“Just a little west of here, west of Bartlesville, through the west they have big, wide prairies where the cowboys used to ride,” she said.

One of those legendary cowboys was Pecos Bill, about whom tall tales rebound. So the story goes, Pecos Bill was dissatisfied with the puny rainbows that existed in his neighborhood, so, as the spring went by and the rains came, he lassoed a rainbow whenever he saw one and packed it in his saddlebag. When his collection was large enough, he put them together to make a proper rainbow.

“He grew up with coyotes. They didn’t teach him how to sew,” Stallings told the children.

So the resourceful frontier hero used cactus spines to put the rainbow together. When he did, all were amazed by the colorful arc – from the fellow cowhands to the cud-chewing cows and the birds.

Everyone was impressed, except the sun. He didn’t particularly like the colorful display and evaporated it, sending drops to the ground.

“All of those little drops of rainbows sprouted, and bloomed . . . and the prairie was covered with flowers, so thick in places you couldn’t see the grass,” she said.

“That was a made-up story, but now I’m going to tell you a real, true story,” Stallings continued.

She then related an ecological story, how beavers used to thrive on the San Pedro River in Arizona. They were so plentiful it was known as Beaver River. But the demand for beaver fur to make Europeans’ hats caused them to be trapped and exterminated in the area.

The river flooded, tearing down the beaver dams. The western willow flycatchers, which used to nest in the bushes along the river, also vanished. The area became more dry. In 1992, beavers were reintroduced to the area. As some area ranchers know, beavers can interfere with water flow, and plenty of beavers for the project were trapped in the urban area of Phoenix.

“Beavers were causing trouble in Phoenix. They said, ‘You want beavers, take ‘em,’” Stallings said.

With the beavers’ return, the natural balance was restored. The western willow flycatchers also came back, much to the delight of birders.

“Every critter has a place where it needs to be,” Stallings said.

She pulled out her autoharp to sing a song to that theme, saying “birds swim in the air, fish fly in the sea.”

As she sang, one blonde toddler, one shoe off and one purple shoe on, became fascinated with the instrument and ambled curiously to a position right in front of Stallings. But she retreated as Stallings launched into another tale, about rain and thunder and lightning. This was a tale about the Japanese thunder maker, one Stallings garnered when working closely with a Japanese storyteller.

“Do you know that when it thunders you need to tuck in your shirt?” she asked the children.

That’s because the thunder maker likes to snack on belly buttons.

After relating the story of a Japanese kite maker and his meeting with the thunder maker in the sky, Stallings asked, “Do you think it’s a true story? Do you think it really happened?”

A blonde girl with braided hair in the front row shook her head back and forth in a vehement “No.”

“I think that’s a Japanese tall tale,” Stallings agreed.

Whether true or tall, all the tales she shared contained the theme of the importance of water to all life on the planet, and the importance of working together to preserve life.