From the Field Notes of Colonel Aubrey Fitch-Harrington, FRS

Observations Upon the Fauna of Southern Africa — Volume III (In Preparation)

“The Leopard Tortoise (Stigmochelys pardalis) is the largest tortoise in Southern Africa, reaching forty-three kilograms and an authenticated age of one hundred years. It climbs — this is documented and was personally verified by the author across three separate mornings before he accepted it as a characteristic rather than an incident. It drinks by submerging the nasal openings in water, an intake mechanism faster than conventional drinking, employed when the animal is significantly dehydrated. It swims. The shell is the backbone and ribs, fused and keratinised; the tortoise cannot leave the shell because the shell is the tortoise. The pattern — gold and black, individual to each animal — gives the species its name. The author wrote one field note on the first morning and was confident it would require no revision. It has required four mornings and a complete reconsideration of the word slow.”

The first entry read: Leopard tortoise. Adult. Stationary on the game path, eastern section. Shell pattern good. Moving slowly northeast. Will observe tomorrow.

He did not observe tomorrow because the tortoise was not there tomorrow.

He looked carefully. The path where he had seen it, the surrounding grass, the drainage line nearby. He found the tracks — the specific paired drag-marks of the shell in soft earth — leading in a direction he had not expected and then losing themselves in the rocky ground above the drainage line. He noted: Tortoise: relocated. Position: unknown. Searching.

He did not find it on the second morning either.

On the third morning he was not specifically looking for the tortoise — he was on his standard survey circuit, the one he had walked every morning for three weeks, and he had adjusted his expectations accordingly. The tortoise was somewhere. It was moving. He had filed this under slow animals moving in ways that did not correspond to his field notes’ implied timeline and was prepared to revise the timeline.

He found it on the slope above the river.

Not on the path. Not in the drainage line vicinity. On a slope above the river that he had assessed, on his first morning’s survey, as not traversable by anything carrying a shell of these dimensions at this angle. He had made this assessment in passing, as one makes assessments of terrain one is not planning to occupy oneself, and had not revisited it.

The tortoise was at the top of the slope.

The slope was approximately forty degrees. The tortoise was forty-three kilograms. The Colonel stood at the bottom and looked up at it in the warm morning air, which smelled of the river and warm stone and the specific dry quality of a slope that faces the morning sun.

“It has been to the river,” Cetshwayo said.

“It has been to the river and come back up this slope.”

“Yes.”

The Colonel looked at the tortoise, which was at the top of the slope exhibiting no particular distress and no apparent awareness that it had been doing something the Colonel’s field notes had not accounted for.

He revised the field notes that afternoon and again the following morning after reading the reference material he had been carrying since Cape Town.