Here's a condensed excerpt from an e-mail to my sister about an incident at the park Friday:
I noticed on the ground a baby turtle all by himself. I'm sure it was frightened out of its wits, but it was too scared to even know to crawl into its shell and hide. I used a scratch page of my miniature sketch book to lift the hatchling and drop it into the flow at Lower Bridge, where the creek opens up into Deeper Pond.
At first, I think the hatchling was scared, seeing the strange pond with carp swimming around in it, because he scrambled around in the flow, looking for rocks to clamber back up on land. But either those other critters told him to stop struggling and come home, or he lost strength to hang onto the rock against the flow of water that pushed him out towards the pond, because the next time I looked, I saw him swimming out into the pond, hopefully, heeding a relieved mother's beckoning.
Come to think of it, maybe it was her voice the baby turtle heard calling.
