The Tortoise Who Crossed the Garden

Walter was at the wrong end of the garden, and it was getting dark.

This was his own doing. He had gone up to the rhubarb after lunch, because there was a dandelion under it he had been thinking about since Tuesday, and he had eaten the dandelion, and then thought about it a bit more, with his eyes shut, and now the sun had gone off the wall and the air had that thin, grey, end-of-the-day feel, and his house, which was a wooden box with straw in it beside the greenhouse, was at the other end of the lawn.

The whole lawn. All of it.

Walter was a tortoise. He was, so far as anyone knew, about sixty, and he had crossed that lawn a great many times, and he knew exactly how long it took. He looked at it now, in the dusk, flat and grey and enormous, with the greenhouse a pale shape at the far end and the dew starting to come down, and he thought, well. And he set off.

There is no point describing a tortoise setting off. It looks like a tortoise standing still, only a little more so.

The rhubarb bed had a low edge of bricks, and he got over it the way he always did, which was to go up until he tipped and then wait to see which way he came down. He came down on the lawn. Good. The grass was cool and wet at the tips, and he pointed himself at the greenhouse and went.

A slug was going the same way.

It was on his left, about a shell’s length off, and for a while they kept level, which was embarrassing for both of them. Neither said anything. Then the slug found something it liked and stopped, and Walter went on, and was alone in front, and did not gloat about it, much.

Halfway across the lawn there was the stream. It was not a stream, really. It was a channel of stones the people had made, with a trickle of water from a pipe, and a bridge over it, a small flat plank. But to a tortoise it was a river and a bridge and a decision, and Walter came to the edge of it and stopped, as he always stopped, and looked at the plank.

It was wet. It was narrow. It was, he happened to know, exactly one and a half Walters wide.

He went up onto it. He went along it, very slowly, with the trickle going by underneath and a frog somewhere saying its one word over and over, and in the middle he stopped and listened to the frog, because it was that or think about the edges, and the frog said its word, and Walter went on, and came down off the far end onto the grass with a small bump that nobody heard.

The dark had come down properly now. The house had lit up behind him, yellow squares, and somebody was doing something with plates. Ahead of him the greenhouse was catching the last of the sky in its glass, and beside it, low down, in shadow, was the box.

He could see it. That was the thing. From here, in the dark, with his legs cold and the lawn still going on, he could see it, and it was his, and every step now was a step nearer it and not a step nearer anything else.

He went over the gravel by the greenhouse, which was the worst bit and always had been, and he did not hurry it, because hurrying gravel does not help. He came to the box. He put his head in. Straw. The good dry smell of it, and his own smell under that, and he went in, all the way, and turned, with some effort, to face the door.

Then he drew his head in. Then his legs. Then there was only a shell in a box in the dark, and the sound of a garden going on without him.

The frog said its word. The dew came down. Somewhere up by the rhubarb, the slug was still deciding.

Walter had crossed the garden. It had taken him all evening. It always did.