1
We were almost halfway down the gully when my sister
screamed and called out, “I’ve found him!”
But she hadn’t: it was just an old rusty can gleaming wet in the
dew among the leaves. It wasn’t George by any stretch of the
imagination: I’d know George anywhere and he wouldn’t be
down the gully, of that I was pretty sure. He’d be up top, in the
Great Meadow where the grass was fresh and tender, and there
were hosts of dandelions which he liked.
Not in the gully, which was deep, and dry, usually, and lined
with great ash and oak, and chalky along the edges full of warrens
and, down at the bottom by the road, old cans and bedsteads and
stoves which people dumped among the nettles. George was the
kind of tortoise who thought for himself, and he would never
have thought to wander so far from the house when the Great
Meadow was bung full of food and surrounded the place in which
he usually lived. He wasn’t a complete fool.
I struggled up the side of the gully and broke through the
nettles and elder bushes into the field. I was soalting with dew.
Down below in the valley the first chimneys were smoking and
the meadow lay still in silver light, a good hundred acres of it. It
was going to be a bit of a job to find George among all that grass.
My sister was behind me, having scrambled painfully through
the elder branches, whimpering from time to time. I didn’t take
any notice. If you said anything the least bit kind, or helpful, or
sympathetic, they started to snivel, and after that cry. And you
might as well have said nothing, because then they only did a
whimper or two and, seeing you didn’t care much, stopped. So I
didn’t say a thing to her. She rubbed her srung knees with a dock
leaf and pushed her hair from her eyes.
“Why did we have to get up at dawn to look for him?”
“Because.”
“But because why?”
“Because it’s the best time to find them. That’s why.”
“To find tortoises!” she scoffed, rubbing away at her wretched
knees. “You’d think you’d been hunting them all your life.”
I started to hum and sing a bit.