The late hour kept me running a brisk 50 mph (the maximum controllable speed on gravel), so that an apparent chunk of slate in the road nearly slipped beneath my radiator before it caught my attention. Grinding to a halt, I stared at the plate-sized rock in the rearview mirror. Sure enough, it sprouted two yellow-striped forearms and a matching head, with acid eyes that glared at me through the pall of dust I'd raised. I snatched my camera and jumped out, thinking to bag a quick photo, then chase my chelonian friend off the road before a less attentive traveller squashed him flat.
But on my advance he sprinted into the undergrowth, with scornful disregard for my species' reluctance to apply that verb to his. I was left to herd him with stomping boots, back into the fading sunlight, to get my portrait. He appreciated none of this - not the running over, not the dirt bath, not the brisk jog, and most particularly not the herding. When the slides came back from the lab, I found a study of one seriously bent Western painted turtle.
Still, I had to admire the guy's pluck. We were a hundred yards from water. Wherever he'd come from, wherever he was going, he'd earned his rest in that place.
(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of Chrysemys picta bellii courtesy of Gary M. Stolz, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and Wikimedia Commons.)
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