how the turtle got its grump

Thursday, jul. 3, 2008   |   0 comments

At 2am, the ominous crunching of Daisy working a bone out in the livingroom penetrated my deep-sleep brain enough to stir me into semi-awake-itude. The hollow clunking of the dog worrying a marrow-stuffed bone wasn’t such an unusual sound in and of itself, but the timing was off. In my sleep-slowed head, I mused on the anomaly of it—in my years of knowing her, Daisy had never left our cozy bed in the dark, small hours of night to go chew on her bone. Stranger still, I didn’t recall either Marco or myself giving her a bone in recent days. Maybe she found some chicken bones in the trash? But chicken bones have more of a snapping sort of crunch to them. And the chicken we’d had that night was boneless. Huh.

After about five more minutes of pondering, the pull of the mystery overcame the pull of sleep, and I got up to discover just what she’d managed to get her mouth onto.

It was dark, so all I could figure was that her little chew project was rounder and darker than any bone I’d ever seen. I picked it up and brought it up to my face for a closer squint, as Daisy wagged cheerfully at my feet. And then in a whoosh I went from sleepily puzzled to freak-out scream-mode. “Daisy!” The dog wagged even harder, all proud and self-congratulatory. “This is NOT FOR YOU!” Because? It turned out? The thing I was holding was our turtle’s shell, denuded of its arms and legs and head and tail.

Marco came staggering in at the sound of my yells and I—scrambled and garbled—managed to break the news to him. And Marco, who has owned that turtle for 15 years and who was still basically asleep, did not react well. Tearfully he took the shell and cradled it, and then he asked me if I would do a perimeter check for turtle parts, because he just couldn’t face it. I turned on the light and carefully checked the carpet. Nothing.

We took the remains over to the light, and after closer examination we realized that the turtle’s legs and etc. weren’t so much missing as they were tucked impossibly far up inside him. Marco rushed him back into his turtle house, noting in a panicked, self-recriminating voice that the door was open and that Marco had probably forgotten to close it after changing the turtle’s water the night before. And how thrilled Daisy must have been to discover that oversight! Marco gently placed the turtle inside his water dish, which he likes to swim around in, but there was no movement. So sad! With waning hope, Marco set him beside the water dish, closed the door to the house, and scrambled over to ask the internet how long turtles can survive with their heads sucked inside out.

Marco searched on “dog” and “turtle” and “attack,” which conjured up a gruesome list of links to “hilarious” videos of dog attacking turtles. “That’s not funny,” Marco yelped. “Nothing about that is funny!”

As Marco continued to frantically ask the internet for answers, I went and lay down next to the turtle cage. “Marco? MARCO? I think I just saw his leg move!”

Marco rushed in and the turtle moved again, and we cheered a big cheer. And then we gave him some raspberries. But he wasn’t really in an eating mood, since that would require removing his head from its inverted triage mode, which he didn’t even consider doing until well into the next morning.

But slowly and surely, the turtle and his various extremities came out of their shell. And after a week of vet-prescribed medicated salving for his various scrapes and dents (poor thing!), including a weekend jaunt to Russian River—he needed his drops twice a day so we had to bring him with us when we went to visit Maggie, Bryan, and Co. Evany: “Does baby Hank know about not putting fingers near the mouth-end of angry, biting turtles?” Maggie: “He’ll learn!”—he now seems to be back to his same enraged self, if perhaps even a shade grumpier.

Meanwhile bad, bad Daisy is currently in the midst of a long lecture series about how the turtle is family and we never, ever chew on family, no matter how great it tastes.

And, just like in Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing when the Fudge ate Peter’s pet turtle and the parents made up for it by giving Peter a pet dog which he named Turtle, we all lived happily ever after.

Welcome back, turtle.