by Tamara Gray
‘The goats however ate everything. They ate the tender grass in the glades, the yellow leaves of the cotton. Then they ate the white passionflowers and the silver bark of the torchwood trees. Then the cafetillo bush. Finally, they ate the jungle. They climbed the trees on their hooves and they ate and ate. Nothing was left for us. It wasn’t the fault of the goats. They were trapped on the island. They weren’t buzzards, they couldn’t fly away. They had to eat what they could find.
‘Then rats arrived on the island as well. They must have come with the boats. The rats ate our eggs. Sentida and I walked long distances to find just a few yellow blossoms of the cotton plant. We walked miles to find food. The jungle disappeared and there was no shade. Pinta Island became a desert.
‘Over time, I changed as well. I became an adult. During the cool nights when I was inside my shell, I became all tingly when I thought about Sentida who slept next to me. I thought about the wrinkly skin around her neck and legs, her smooth shell and her small nostrils… I fell in love.
‘I started to behave like an idiot. I gazed at the moon at night, asking her to speak to Sentida for me. I wandered alone around the island composing poems, but couldn’t think of a word that rhymed with tortoise.
‘I was living in a fantasy world in which I had saved Pinta Island. I was a hero. Sentida and I were sitting together in a sea of yellow cotton wool.
‘Then one day I woke up from my dreams.
‘I saw that the island was bare. The jungle had disappeared. The goats had eaten everything. All that was left was dry grass, cacti and bare rocks. I shouted: “No! It’s not possible! Sentida? Sentida, where are you?” But Sentida was not there. Lost again? Everyone had left. Everyone.
‘Only I had survived, deep in my shell, with my poems of moonlight and dreams.
‘Around me lay empty shells. All the turtles had died.
‘I searched for long time for the empty shell of my Sentida.
‘Finally, I sat down on the rocks and gazed at the sea. I wished that tortoises could cry. I recited my second rate poems that Sentida would never hear. But then I heard a quiet voice.
“George? George, is that you?”
‘I turned around. It was her. It was really her. She poked her head and her legs out of the shell next to all the empty shells. She came over to me and whispered: “I am so weak. I thought I was dead.”
‘I whispered: “But you are not dead.” And then I believe we kissed each other.
‘At that time, just offshore a boat arrived and stopped nearby. Humans came to our island. Sentida hid inside her shell. But I could not hide anymore. I walked over to the humans. I wanted to tell them my opinion about the stupid idea with the goats. But these were not the humans who had brought the goats, they were different. They simply carried me off to their boat and I was too weak to resist. I shouted: “Sentida!” I don’t know if she could hear me. The boat left. We sailed into the endless blue and I didn’t know what to do.
‘The last female tortoise of my kind sat on Pinta Island and would now starve to death.’
‘Did she starve to death?’ asked Thomas. George looked at him for a long time.
‘What do you believe?’ he asked finally. Thomas slowly shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. You have such a mysterious grin on your face.’
‘You haven’t asked for the treasure. The ten thousand dollar treasure.’
Thomas nodded. ‘I had forgotten about it.’
‘You are making progress’, said George.
‘In what?’
‘In forgetting the unimportant things. Dollars are unimportant. You can’t buy a female giant tortoise for ten thousand dollars. But this is exactly what humans try to do. Ask Camilla. And come again tomorrow, I will be waiting for you.’
Just like before, Camilla sat at the entrance. Today she chewed on her hair. ‘Did you get the answer?’ she asked him.
‘I believe he needs a female of his own kind.’
‘There isn’t one. We offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who could bring one to us. Nobody did. On Isabella Island someone found a tortoise that perhaps is related to an Abingdonii. The whole island was searched. But no, nothing. There is no female of this species left alive.’
‘Perhaps there is,’ said Thomas. ‘And I believe I know someone who knows where she is.’
‘What?’
‘Give me a little more time,’ he asked her. ‘George is a stubborn old gentleman. It is not easy to extract things from him. But he sends his regards.’ He swallowed. ‘Would you go for dinner with me tonight?’
She nodded. ‘Did George suggest you ask me?’
‘Indirectly,’ said Thomas.
* * *
The sun at the equator was shining as hot as usual on the third day of Dr Thomas Harlow’s visit. But suddenly he felt that he was in the right place. The sea was infinite and blue.
‘George,’ he said when he climbed into the tortoise compound. ‘I am thinking silly things.’
‘You are in love,’ said George. He seemed to be grinning.
‘Tell me about the treasure’, begged Thomas. ‘Tell me about Sentida. She is the treasure, isn’t she?’
‘Of course,’ answered George. ‘They brought me here to Santa Cruz. They looked after me. They gave me food to eat. And many researchers came to study me. I became famous but I was not happy. Every night I dreamt about Sentida, alone on Pinta Island. At full moon I sat in my enclosure and asked the big white tortoise of the moon to look after her.
‘On one of these full moon nights, I believed I heard her voice. “George!” she called very quietly. “George! I am here!”
“Are you a dream?” I asked
“Turn your head!” said the voice in the dream. “To the right. No left! I still don’t know right from left.”
‘I turned my head and saw her in the shadow of the research centre. I found a hole in fence and escaped through it. We both left the centre together.
‘Sentida spoke. “I was with you on the boat. I smuggled myself on board when nobody was watching. I was hiding underneath a pile of ropes. I arrived with you at Santa Cruz. But unfortunately, I walked off in the wrong direction!” We laughed together as we did when we were small tortoises. And it’s possible that we kissed again. We talked all night long. When it was morning, some men approached calling my name. Sentida was so terrified that she walked off.
‘They put me back into my enclosure and fixed the hole in the fence. And from then on there was no chance to escape. The humans said: “We were so worried about you. What if something had happened to you? What if you had lost your way? What if you hadn’t found any food?”
“I don’t lose my way. I am not Sentida.” But they didn’t hear that.
‘From that day on, Sentida visited me at every full moon. And we kissed through the fence even though it was a bit difficult.
“Let them catch you!” I whispered. “They only want us to multiply. You could join me and once you’ve laid some eggs, they will let us go. You will see!”
‘She shook her head. The wrinkles around her neck were so beautiful. “I am frightened of humans,” she whispered.
“I’m staying here where I am free. You must come out to me. You must find a way.”
‘But I didn’t find a way. And every full moon night I begged her to let herself be caught. And every time, she said no. But still she came. I think those were our best years.
‘Those years turned into decades, and we became old.
‘Slowly, things changed. “George, I love you,” turned into “George, eat more lettuce.” “George, please escape,” became, “George be careful you have a weak heart. George do this and George do that. George, don’t bathe in the dirty pool. George, move into your shell or you will catch a cold. George, don’t go into the sun so much.”
‘I did not enjoy the full moon anymore. She even spoke to other female tortoises about me. She told them they should keep an eye on me because I was not young anymore.’
‘But where is she?’ asked Thomas finally. ‘You said Sentida is the treasure, didn’t you? And you said you knew where she is. Where?’
‘Well,’ said George and looked into the distance.
‘Well, what?’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’ said George. ‘I’m not going to tell you. I would like to have a bit more peace. Only a little while; a couple of days: maybe a few years. We can get very old us tortoises, we can live to 200 years old, I believe. There is no hurry. I would like to enjoy the peace and quiet. Eating unhealthy things. Bathing in dirty water. When the time is right, I will tell Camilla where Sentida is.’
Thomas leaned over George very close to his old head. ‘Tell me where she is!’ he whispered insistently. ‘Tell me now! You have enjoyed your peace for long enough!’
George closed his mouth and looked at Thomas, stubbornly holding his tongue.
Camilla walked up behind him and asked: ‘Have you found out anything? Do you know where she is?’
Then George put his head to the side and winked at him.
‘Camilla,’ said Thomas and climbed out of the enclosure. ‘I have to tell you something.’
‘What?’
He took a deep breath. ‘There are two things. First, I—I love you.’
‘Oh,’ said Camilla. ‘Will you be staying here then?’
‘Perhaps. I am going to think about that. It depends if you are going to force me to eat lettuce when we grow old.’
She laughed. ‘Perhaps. I will think about it. And second?’
‘Do you promise that you won’t get angry with me?’
‘I promise.’
He took her hands in his and looked briefly at George who looked terrific for an elderly gentleman tortoise. He winked at him.
‘Second—I can’t really talk to animals.’
Tiger, Tiger
by Lauren St John
Most days Caleb was still a football field’s length from Shadow Alley when he had to pause, take a shuddering breath and shove his hands deep into his pockets. It was the only way he could keep them from shaking. Today, though, he’d promised himself it would be different. He’d be different. His birthday would change things.
‘You’re eleven now, Caleb, and you need to grow up and stop being a crybaby,’ he told himself. ‘Pa’s gone and you’re the man of the house.’
It was late afternoon but the sun baked down on his thin brown shoulders. The sky and the landscape were the colour of old clothes. The rain fell less often with each passing year. Eventually it would stop altogether and then the world really would end, just as they’d claimed it would all those years ago when the oil ran out.
Passing the scarred outline of concrete and mangled metal that had once been the zoo, Caleb tried to bolster his courage by imagining the strength of will it must have taken for lions, bears and tigers to spend a lifetime imprisoned in tiny cages, like murderers or thieves, far from the jungles or African wilderness of their birth. Caleb had never seen such a wild animal except in books. Outside of a few reserves and zoos, most were extinct. Caleb couldn’t understand what sort of people his parents’ generation and that of his grandparents and great-parents must have been to stand by and allow creatures as heart-stoppingly beautiful as a snow leopard, a jaguar, a golden eagle, a dolphin, or an oryx gazelle to be wiped from the face of the earth by hunters and quack medicine men, but they had.
‘We thought they’d always be there,’ his mother would say with a shrug when he asked her about it. ‘We kept waiting for someone to save them.’
‘Why didn’t you save them?’ Caleb wanted to know.
‘I wish I had,’ she’d told him sadly. ‘I wish I had.’
The animal Caleb would have most like to have seen was a tiger, but the tigers had escaped and most of the other zoo inmates either starved to death or had been lost to illness or fighting during the last Water War, back when Caleb was three. His father had been killed in battle not long afterwards, defending the local lake. Now the lake was all dried up. To Caleb, it was as if he’d died for nothing.
The tigers had died for nothing too. They’d fled into the mountains, where they’d been cornered by Levi and his dad. Levi couldn’t have been more than ten at the time, but he claimed to have shot a pouncing tiger as his dad finished off the other one. The skins were said to be magnificently displayed in their mansion.
At the thought of Levi, Caleb swallowed hard and shoved his hands deep into his pockets. It didn’t work.The closer he got to Shadow Alley, the more he trembled. He was tempted to run home with some excuse about how the flour seller at the market was ill, but his mother, who knew nothing of the horrors of the underpass, would only send him back the following day and he’d have to run the gauntlet again.
In Shadow Alley, it was cool, airless and dark. Caleb smelled Levi’s cologne before he saw him. Every hair on his body stood on end. He put his head down and walked quickly and purposefully towards the silvery shaft of daylight at the far end.
‘I’m eleven now,’ he reminded himself. ‘Nobody can touch me, nobody can touch me, nobody can touch me.’
‘Why the hurry, Caleb?’ asked Jeb, stepping out in front of him. At seventeen, the Sandler boy was all muscle and no sense. It was like being confronted by a boulder.
‘Yeah, Caleb, why the rush?’ demanded Zach, Jeb’s smarter, slimmer twin.
‘Leave me alone,’ Caleb pleaded.
Levi strolled from the shadows. He was a year older than the brothers and as handsome as a Greek god. It was only on closer inspection that you could see that his eyes were flat and hard and his mouth sulky and spoiled.
‘I wish we could,’ he told Caleb, ‘but, you see, Jeb hereis bored and that can be dangerous. Zach and I like to keep him entertained and we think you can help us. Plus, it’ll be lots of fun for you. So how about it? Why don’t we play: Where shall we go today?’
‘No!’ To Caleb’s shame, his eyes filled with tears. He was sweating with terror. ‘I don’t want to play. Please let me go. I only want to buy flour at the market.’
Levi grinned. Nothing gave him more pleasure than watching people squirm or beg. ‘Of course you can go to the market, Caleb,’ he said. ‘But not today. Today we’re going on a little journey. A magical mystery tour. We think you need a little fun in your life, Caleb. We think you need to grow up and be a man.’
* * *
Forty days and forty nights. That’s what they told him as they drove away and left him to his fate, and the only thing Caleb was proud of was that he’d somehow managed to keep from crying until the sound of their engine faded and he was alone in the vast, blue-grey emptiness of the mountains. Then he didn’t just cry, he sobbed, because in the end they’d taken everything from him—and this time they might just have cost him his life.
They’d started by stealing his school fees and books from him on the very first day of term. His mother, who with Caleb’s assistance, scraped a meager living running a bakery from their kitchen, had saved for months to raise the funds for her son to attend the local school. He hadn’t had the heart to tell her that he’d been robbed of all of it. Consequently, he set off every weekday morning as if he was going to class, and spent the day hiding in an old barn, hot and hungry. To keep his mind occupied, he’d invent lessons he could tell his mother about in the evening.
It wasn’t that Caleb had been singled out for bullying. Shadow Alley divided the old and new sections of the town. For the past two years, Levi and his friends had controlled the underpass like highwaymen, taking what they pleased and beating up anyone who resisted, regardless of age or status. Their favourite game was ‘Where Shall We Go Today?’ Twice before Caleb had fallen victim to it. Once they’d put him in the metal scoop of a builder’s crane, raised it up to two hundred feet and left him there overnight. Another time, they’d blindfolded him, shoved him into a sack, and dumped him on the rubbish tip in the next town. It had taken Caleb nearly two days to get home, stinking and covered in flies. His mother had
been out of her mind with worry.
‘Please don’t do this,’ he’d begged when it became clear that they were serious about subjecting him to what Levi called a “test of manhood” by leaving him in one of the bleakest, most inhospitable mountain ranges in the country with nothing more than a box of matches and a single bottle of water. ‘My mum needs me to help her in the bakery. She’s old and her health is not good. If she thinks I am missing or dead, the shock could kill her.’
‘Well now, we wouldn’t want your mother on our conscience,’ scoffed Levi as he bit into a lamb chop. When Levi’s electric-powered Land Rover had climbed as high as it could go on the crumbling mountain road, he’d parked on a flattish section of gravel and Jeb and Zach had cooked up a meaty feast on a makeshift barbecue. Caleb had never eaten anything that came from an animal, but the cooking smells were a torturous reminder of how hungry he was. His captors ate without offering him any food, however, leaving him tied up and shivering as the sun set and a mountain chill descended.
Blood dribbled down Levi’s chin and he licked it up greedily. ‘Don’t worry, Caleb,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell your mum that you’re going to be working for my father for the next forty days. She won’t even miss you.’
It took Caleb all the courage he possessed to say: ‘She’ll want to know where my wages are. When I come home, I mean.’
Levi gave an impatient growl and drop-kicked the lambchop bone off the edge of the mountain. ‘You’re not going to be going home, you idiot,’ he muttered under his breath.