Turtle Toy

I let our dogs out this morning and left them out for about an hour, pretty much standard procedure. Maggie comes rushing back in, in her usual state of high excitement, with TJ following in a state of much more excitement than usual. Ordinarily, he's more of a plodder, but this morning he's dancing around as much as she is. That's when I noticed that he had something in his mouth, something rather large. When he noticed me looking at it curiously, he proudly dropped it at my feet and rushed off to his breakfast. It took a few seconds to register that what I was looking at was a turtle shell. With blood on it. Just eeewww.

I knew I had to get it out of there before the dogs finished their breakfast, or they were going to put up a bit of resistance to me taking it away. So I grabbed a plastic grocery bag and scooped it up (only touching the thing through the plastic, of course) and took it outside. And in a split second it occurred to me that it might not actually be dead. Perhaps he had done exactly what turtles do to protect themselves and withdrawn into his shell. The blood could very well be TJ's, the result of gnawing on the shell trying to get to the gooey delight inside. Seems like a huge long-shot, but how to know? The thought of a live turtle trapped at the bottom of our garbage can was troubling.

So rather than throwing the "carcass" in the garbage can, I placed the bag on the ground beside the can, turned over on its side. Fast forward a couple of hours, and I go back outside to peek at the back, fully expecting to see a very dead turtle in a plastic bag next to the can. And I find.... nothing. No bag, no turtle. It took a few moments of poking around for me to find the plastic bag, now empty, halfway down the driveway. At first I'm feeling all clever and noble, thinking the turtle walked out of the bag and down the driveway, dragging the bag behind it. Still a possibility. But then I got to wondering if perhaps another neighborhood dog wandered into the yard and fished a nice little treasure out of the bag. So now I'm bummed out, but maybe without reason. I mean, there are not a lot of dogs wandering loose in our neighborhood; it's an upscale area where everyone's very big on fences and leash laws. So I'm going to choose to believe that there's one really lucky turtle out there. I'm going to choose to feel clever and noble, and grateful that the turtle was smart enough to take advantage of a second chance. Nobody gets to feel that way often enough, right?