...continued from Part I...
It took me about two more weeks to talk myself into it. That particular night, the scratching was right above my head in a place where the ladder would fit. Steeling myself, I fetched my equipment, climbed the ladder and stood for a few minutes -- gathering my courage while envisioning something large and furry jumping onto my face, or perhaps several bats fluttering out into my bedroom. But I had gotten this far and I had to know what it was. I slowly raised a ceiling tile adjacent to the noise then simultaneously switched on the flashlight and stuck my head up into the void. I saw two red eyes though the rest of the form didn't register at first. And then I realized Good Grief! it's a turtle. A turtle?
It was a box turtle; the kind I used to find in the woods years before when my father would take me mushroom hunting for morels. What was it doing in the ceiling? I reached in and grasped it by the shell anticipating its weight and my hand just floated up. It weighed nothing. Suddenly I was overcome with remorse. Due to my mistaken assumptions, poor detection skills and unreasonable fear, this poor turtle had been crawling around in the barren ceiling, slowly dying of thirst and malnutrition, for at least six weeks. I carried it into the kitchen for closer inspection and to try and save it.
Turtles are pretty wrinkle-y critters when they are healthy, but this one was just about dried out. It was either unafraid, or more likely, just too weak to withdraw its' emaciated limbs and neck and close it's shell. But the eyes were bright orange and very much alive. I set the turtle in the big porcelain sink and offered a jar lid of water. That turtle craned its' neck about, put its' beak into the water, and began to take small swallows - about one every 3 or 4 seconds. This went on for over 5 minutes until the turtle finally raised its' head and looked at me as if to say "what now?" From my gardening days, I remembered that turtles liked tomatoes so I offered it a wedge along with some bread soaked in water and some lettuce. It began to eat the tomato. I was gratified to think it might survive its' ordeal.
The local vet said what I had offered was a good start for its' diet, and to add tuna as a protein source. At the library I found a book on turtles that told me this was a common box turtle; more specifically: a female carolina carolina terrapina - (female because of the orange eyes), found generally along the Atlantic coast and the Appalachians. New York was a bit far north for one of these, and I began to suspect that my upstairs neighbor might have lost him a turtle. (He had recently been on a camping trip to North Carolina.) Could he have brought her back with him? The timing was about right. But how did she get into the dropped ceiling?
I never found out because I never told 'ol Dave about finding the turtle. I was upset that he might have been responsible for its' being lost in the first place, and that he might want her back if that was so. I had already planned her future. I would release her back into the wild in North Carolina on my way to Nag's Head in a few months.
It was November when I found her and by April she weighed over a pound, had many fewer wrinkles and was possibly rather chubby for a tortoise. As I drove along a backroad in North Carolina, I thought how she had never seemed afraid of me. I hoped I was not making a mistake - could she have been raised in captivity? Highly unlikely. I worried a little that she might not re-adjust to the wild, but I felt this was the right thing to do. Way, way out in the national forest, adjacent to a wetland, I found a great place to let her go.
I put her out onto the mossy ground with the last of the food I had brought for her. She had not been on natural earth since I had found her, and she stretched her neck out to its' full length and looked about. She seemed quite excited. As I was backing away, taking a couple of photographs of her, I heard the strangest sound: a kind of croaking, squeaking sound like nothing I had ever heard before, and it was coming from my turtle! I had never read nor heard that turtles made vocal sounds. Amazed, I listened for several minutes as she repeated these sounds at short intervals. The last I saw of her, she was marching rather purposefully off into the woods; quiet now. I left her there with mixed emotions...
This is an absolutely true little story that took place over twenty years ago. Box turtles live a long time and I like to think she's still scuttling about, perhaps having added many offspring to the carolina carolina terrapina population of North America.
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| The Mystery In The Ceiling...... Part II |
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