Perhaps reading “The Bagman’s Story” in Chapter 14 of The Pickwick Papers last night set me up for it. More likely though it was the usual early morning fuzzyness. Bode has established a ritual, so was able to get myself dressed and him into his harness and on the doorstep just after 6 am.
My first impression was that someone had put a new rock on the gravel mulch beside the mailbox post. Then it moved! Bode snuffled around, but didn’t have his topknot bound so didn’t really see it until I tried to turn him back so I could get the camera. It was like trying to keep him from licking the toad last year. (About an hour of uncontrollable slobbering resulted even with rinsing his mouth, but he seemed to have no lasting bad effects.) This time he wanted to stand on the turtle’s shell and tease it out without a thought that it might bite him. I could hear it hiss. I managed to get Bode back into the house and took the picture. It looked like the turtle had tried to burrow into another spot a few feet away and, like with the base of the mailbox post, ran into the landscaping cloth under the stones.
When we returned, the turtle was in the side yard beside the peas, under the surviving sunflower stalks by the fence. When I checked again, it was trying to dig at the foundation between the garden hose and compost pile. Now it seems to be gone, hope it survives our busy street.
It looks like the same kind of turtle I saw last June 18. Just now checked my photo archives, what passes for a diary these days.
The things we build and activities that seem so important probably amount to just an obstacle as a creature tries to get to where it needs to go to lay its eggs, just as they have been doing since before the houses and factories, before the farms, before the Allegheny River had a name.
