Tilda and the Tortoise Who Knew the Way Home

When the sun started going down over the meadow, everybody ran.

The rabbits ran, in zigzags, the way rabbits do. The mice ran in straight lines, which is quicker. The birds did not run but they flew, which is cheating, and they all got home before the first star and shut their doors.

Tilda was not running. Tilda was lost.

She had come out to pick daisies and had picked them all the way to the far side of the meadow, and now the daisies were in her hand and the path was nowhere and the light was going.

"Excuse me," she said to a rabbit, but the rabbit was already a small white tail in the distance.

"Excuse me," she said to a mouse, but the mouse was already a rustle.

"Excuse me," said somebody, very slowly, from down by her feet.

It was a tortoise. An old one, with a shell like a hill and a face like a kind walnut. It was walking, if you could call it walking, across the meadow in a perfectly straight line, at a speed that would have embarrassed a snail.

"Are you lost?" asked the tortoise.

"Yes," said Tilda. "Everyone's gone home and I don't know the way."

"I know the way," said the tortoise. "I've been walking it for ninety years. Climb on."

Tilda looked at the shell. It was wide and smooth and had a little blanket folded on it, green, as if the tortoise had been expecting somebody.

She climbed on.

The tortoise set off. One foot. Pause. Another foot. Pause. The meadow went past so slowly that Tilda could count the daisies they passed, and name them, and say goodnight to each one.

"Aren't you worried about the dark?" she asked.

"The dark and I have an arrangement," said the tortoise. "It comes at the same speed I walk. We arrive together."

And it was true. As the tortoise crossed the meadow, the light drained out of the grass just a little ahead of them, so that they were always walking along the edge of the evening, never in it and never behind it. The first star came out exactly over the tortoise's head and stayed there, like a lamp on a very slow cart.

Tilda unfolded the little green blanket and put it over her knees.

"Everybody else ran," she said.

"Everybody else got home faster," agreed the tortoise. "And now they are at home, lying awake, with their hearts still going fast from running. Whereas you and I will arrive with our hearts going slow, and go straight to sleep. It's a trade."

Tilda thought about her heart. It was going slow. It was going about one beat for every step the tortoise took.

They passed the big oak. They passed the stile. The path appeared, as paths do when you stop looking for them, and the tortoise followed it without once lifting his head.

"How do you know the way in the dark?" she asked, and her voice came out sleepy.

"I don't," said the tortoise. "I know it in the light, and then I just keep going."

The lights of Tilda's house came into view at the exact moment the last of the day went out of the sky. The tortoise stopped at the gate.

"Here you are," he said. "Heart going slow?"

"Very slow," said Tilda, and slid down, and gave him the daisies, all of them, which he accepted with great dignity and began to eat.

She went in. She went up. She got into bed with her heart going one beat for every step of a tortoise who was still, she knew, walking home, at the speed of the dark, with a star on his head.