Timothy

I've been re-reading "Timothy: or, Notes of an Abject Reptile," by Verlyn Klinkenborg. It's based on the observations of 18th century naturalist Gilbert White as recorded in his own, "The Natural History of Selbourne" and it's told from the point of view of Timothy, the (female) tortoise carried away from her home in the Greek isles by an English sailor, sold for half a crown on the docks of Chichester, and eventually settling in as a permanent resident of White's garden in Selbourne, England.

As caretaker of the enigmatic Ak (a Russian tortoise I purchased at the Petland Discount seven years ago for $40 US), certain passages of the book fill me with guilt. For example, Timothy describing the years spent confined in the brick-walled courtyard of her first mistress, Mrs. Rebecca Snooke.

Kin by close blood, Mrs. Rebecca Snooke. Mr. Gilbert White's father's sister. (So precise they are in the degrees of kinship!) And yet how these humans differ in appearance, compared to the resemblance of tortoises one to another, kin or no kin. Mr. Gilbert White was always struck by the fact that I recognized Mrs. Rebecca Snooke.

She comes into the courtyard waving a lettuce-leaf.

Calling from on high, "Timothy! Timothy!"

Who else could it have been? In forty years only a few humans ever entered that courtyard. Gardeners, maids, young Whites, select friends, Mr. Manning, the doctor. Each one as different as a rook from a redbreast.

Was Mr. Gilbert White never struck by the fact that Mrs. Rebecca Snooke recognized me? If another of my kind had walked up to her on that pebbled path, could she have told the difference? Or would that tortoise have been Timothy too? She knew little enough about me in the end.

"I was much taken," Mr. Gilbert White wrote of me, "with its sagacity in discerning those that do it kind offices: for, as soon as the good old lady comes in sight who has waited on it for more than thirty years, it hobbles towards its benefactress with awkward alacrity; but remains inattentive to strangers. Thus not only 'the ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib,' but the most abject reptile and torpid of beings distinguishes the hand that feeds it, and is touched with the feelings of gratitude!"

Good old lady she was. Yet consider the levity, the dry prolixity, of Mr. Gilbert White's words. The casual human irony when talking about animals. "Awkward alacrity" -- "most abject reptile and torpid of beings" -- this I expect. "Ox" or "ass" I pass by, as I do "owner" and "master." Such words come naturally to humans. Students of property as well as kinship. Kinship a property in each other.

But place Mrs. Rebecca Snooke in a brick box apart from her natural kind. Where she cannot eat her natural food or dig her natural bed. Let her be fed twice a day, albeit cheerfully, by one who keeps her there. Be kind and withhold the drowning rains, the killing frosts. Year after year for forty years. Would she say she has been waited on? Or would another word occur to her?