Buddy is my youngest daughter’s Russian tortoise that escaped last summer while she was at camp, on my watch. We got Buddy for her 11th birthday. She had wanted one for a while, since a bike vacation we took to Croatia (I realize not the first place you might imagine yourself for that kind of trip, but it was fun). Anyway in one restaurant where we were dining al fresco, there were turtles roaming around, along with lots of exotic birds and plants, and as of then she decided she needed a pet of her very own and started pitching me for her birthday gift. Her sister, she claimed, had a rabbit and a parakeet. The dogs and cat were jointly owned by the family. She was deprived. Her brother didn’t have a pet of his own, I pointed out. She wailed, she whined. She knew I would cave. Thank god it was a fairly easy reptile to care for and not a monkey. Her favorite stuffed animal (that she still takes on sleepovers) is a monkey. In fact, this monkey was strapped to the back of her bike on that trip. She put him facing backwards so he could see, straight-jacketed by a bungee cord. I tried not to laugh when we set out every morning.
I bought her the turtle for her birthday and she was thrilled. We set his cage (really a fish tank with cheap rabbit food as bedding) in her room near a plug for the light bulbs that needed to be changed day and night. The first night she came into our room and said we needed to move the cage because he was making too much noise. “What kind of noise,” I asked. “He’s banging against the glass, trying to get out,” she said. Knowing she was a sensitive sleeper, I got out of bed and lugged the thing out into the hall, between her room and her sister’s. We all went back to bed. I am a VERY light sleeper, and even with our door shut I could hear that turtle clonking against his tank. “We should call him Clonk,” my husband said, putting a pillow over his eyes and falling asleep within seconds.
But Buddy he stayed. I hate animals in cages so as part of his care I told my daughter she had to let him out to walk around at least once a day. In the summer we put him outside and that turtle covered ground. He smelled freedom and sprinted for an exit, usually the gate by the driveway. It was odd to see such a prehistoric looking animal moving so fast, his toenails clicking like high heels on the stones. He could navigate coils of the hose like they were speed bumps. The courtyard has limestones set with grass in between and there is a 3-4″ tiled trough fountain running through the middle of it. Buddy tried to cross the fountain once and got stuck in there sideways for an hour or so, until someone went looking for him. Since that day he learned to walk around the fountain. He would pace in front of that wrought iron gate for hours, trying to climb through the gaps. After a few sunny days in a row when I had put him out, he figured out how to dig under the gate, in the space between the limestones. I watched him, fascinated by his relentless pursuit, grabbing him before he disappeared into the Neverland of the beds beyond the driveway, and depositing him on the other side of the fountain again. I knew I had at least a few minutes before there was any real danger of losing him. Usually I put Cocoa (the bunny) out at the same time, and as the dogs are never far from me, and the cat likes to be with the dogs, we were often all outside together while I clipped roses or watered.
On this particular day, I went through an interior gate to the lawn to dead head some roses and took my eye off Buddy for a few moments. He made a break for it. When I realized he was gone, I frantically checked under my car in the driveway and in beds, but that turtle did a runner. My other daughter helped look, and I enlisted any of their friends that happened to come by over the next few days, but we couldn’t find him. I told the landscaper to look when he was working in the yard. No luck. We even tried to get Hank and Charlie to find him, but they are useless trackers.
When I picked my daughter up at camp and broke the news, she said, “It’s okay. He really wanted out.” And that was that.
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