A tortoise lived alongside a flock of geese on the banks of a large pond. The tortoise got along well with his neighbours, although he took rather too much pleasure provoking the geese with sarcastic comments and vexatious remarks. He loved to hear them flap and hiss.

Then one summer a drought caused the pond to dry up. The grass and reeds withered and one by one the geese started to leave. Worried he would be left alone, the tortoise accused the geese of over-reacting. They should sit tight, he said. Autumn would bring rain; it always did.

But autumn did not bring rain and when the last pair of geese was preparing to depart, the tortoise suddenly changed his tune and begged them to take him along. “How would we do that?” they replied. “You can’t fly and you’re too heavy to carry on our backs.”

“What if you held this stick between you?” said the tortoise. “That way you could spread the load.” “And what about you? How would you hold on to the stick?” asked the geese. “With my mouth, of course,” said the tortoise. “You geese really can be a bit slow sometimes.”

The geese ruffled their feathers. “You’ll never be able to keep your mouth shut,” they said. “I will if that’s what I have to do,” the tortoise replied. So the geese agreed to take him with them, but they flew low over the fields to give him a better chance of surviving a mishap.

When the animals below saw a tortoise dangling from a stick carried between two geese, there was uproar. A crowd began to pursue the peculiar trio. “What you doing up there, little guy?” they jeered. “Something’s stuck between his teeth,” said one. “Fetch!” shouted another.

Everyone was laughing at the tortoise. They were all piling in, having their say, and the tortoise desperately wanted to set them straight, tell them what idiots they were. But he couldn’t open his mouth. If only the geese would fly higher and take him out of earshot.

“Higher, for God’s sake, fly higher,” he urged—or would have done had he not already found himself plummeting to the ground. There was time only to regret his terrible mistake before his shell smashed on the hard-baked mud. He was broken. He had opened his mouth.

A ripple of shock and guilt passed through the crowd of on-lookers. They began to argue among themselves, cast blame and declare innocence, but they soon found new distractions, new outrages to pursue. And then, as the tortoise lay dying, it started to rain.

© Richard Parkin, 2022