September 2020.

The other day while I was inside, Steven opened the front door and calls “Hey! Come here and see this!” Usually it’s a deer wandering down the street, or sometimes it’s a weird bug. Before I could ask what it was, he adds “There’s a big turtle walking down the road.”. I rolled my eyes, but went to see what it was that he had mistaken for a large turtle. 

Well. It was....a large turtle. Just moseying down the middle of the road, looking dry & dusty and reminding me of an old cowboy on the trail.

Now, we live about a mile from Idlewild Park, where there are turtles in the lake, and about a mile in the other direction from The Alkali Lakes, where there are also turtles, but to get to both of these places you need to walk 3-4 blocks in town, then cross a reasonably busy road and then walk another five or six minutes to get to the actual water. And that’s for humans....who knows how long for a turtle? I was pretty baffled. 

We put him on the front yard, in the grass and he grumpily snapped at me instead of being grateful that he wasn't going to end up as a turtle pancake. Then we set him in the fountain in our yard so that he could cool off and have a drink. He swam around with his mouth open for a minute, so I guess the poor guy was parched. Or he was swearing at me, hard to tell with turtles.

Now, I know that you are never supposed to move a turtle, as their internal compass has them on the right path, but this fellow apparently had a malfunction and there is no way he would have made it safely to water. It was a conundrum, and we were on our way to Calgary so we had no time to make phone calls and wait for answers. No place would have been open yet anyhow, so I went to my go-to-for-all-queries, Mr. Google, and I learned that turtles should normally be left alone unless they are in danger, which this guy most certainly was. If a vehicle didn’t get him, a dog would have. 

So we let him dry his toes on the grass, and then took him to Idlewild Lake. Steven set him on 

shore and he ran on his little turtle legs to the water, swam around for a minute and then dove into the depths of the lake. 

So, if you see a turtle in my neck of the woods, on the road, I guess it means that we took him to wrong place, so you can take him to The Alkali’s. I did the best I could with the knowledge I had.