The Talkative Tortoise

In a wide, cool lake there lived a tortoise, and his two best friends in all the world were a pair of geese. Every day they talked and laughed together by the water’s edge.

But one year, very little rain came, and the lake began to dry up, lower and lower, until it was clear the tortoise’s home would soon be nothing but mud. The two geese decided they must fly away to a great lake far off, where the water was deep and cool. But how could their dear friend the tortoise come too? Tortoises cannot fly.

Then the clever geese had an idea. “We will each hold one end of a stout stick in our beaks,” they said, “and you, friend tortoise, will bite firmly onto the middle of the stick with your mouth. Then we will carry you through the air to the new lake. But listen carefully. Whatever happens, whatever you see or hear, you must not open your mouth. Not even once. Or you will let go, and fall.”

The tortoise promised. So the two geese took up the stick and flew into the sky, the tortoise hanging on tight below, his jaws clamped shut.

As they soared over a town, the people looked up and pointed and called out in wonder. “Look up there! A tortoise, flying through the sky! How wonderfully clever those two geese must be!” And the tortoise, hearing the geese praised but no one giving him any credit at all, began to feel very cross indeed. He wanted to shout, “It was MY idea, you know!” The thought swelled and swelled inside him, until he simply could not hold it in for one more second, and he opened his mouth to give them a piece of his mind.

And of course, the very instant he opened his mouth, he let go of the stick, and down, down, down he tumbled, all the way to the ground far below. If only he had kept as tight a hold on his temper as he had on that stick, the two kind geese would have carried him safely to his cool new home.