VIRGINIAN-PILOT (Hampton Roads, Virginia) 05 July 07 Missing turtle pulls a fast one, ends up in Great Dismal Swamp (Diane Tennant)
Suffolk: Tonya Murray bought a baby tortoise for her boyfriend eight years ago.
The boyfriend's gone, the tortoise stayed, at least till Monday a week past, when the huge back yard on Dock Landing Road seemed suddenly too small and Joyce dug her way under the fence. She ambled to the front yard and wandered down toward the road where a good Samaritan, fearing she would be crushed, put her in his truck and took her to the Great Dismal Swamp.
That is why Murray, on the Fourth of July and free from work, went in after her.
Joyce is an African sulcata tortoise, a species that can grow to several hundred pounds and about 2-1/2 feet long. Being a baby, Joyce is just 30 pounds and 15 inches.
That Joyce is in the swamp Murray is certain. Exactly where in a 4,000-acre swamp she is not so sure, but she knows the good Samaritan dropped her off in a field near the Washington Ditch.
Two days later, a swamp employee saw her about a mile away, at the gate. He thought she was the strangest-looking snapper he had ever seen, and Murray is sure from the description that it was Joyce - elongated legs, domed shell.
Four times she has hiked in to look.
"If she gets flipped over, she's done. What if she does slide down?" and she peered down the steep bank into the dark standing water of the ditch.
No Joyce.
The Washington Ditch has thick undergrowth on one side and steep banks on the other - most of the way. Where the slope was gentler and the brush thinned out, Murray plunged into the woods to peer under logs and look for scrapes where Joyce might have dug a little cool spot. Joyce, obviously, is quite the digger.
"I just try to keep my eye on open spaces and hope that I just find her layin' there, checking out the scenery," but she didn't. Large spiders and giant thorns sent her back to the trail, where she thinks Joyce also would find traveling easier. Mile markers track her progress on the 4.5-mile trail that ends at Lake Drummond. Once, she brought her bicycle, but mostly she walks. It's a long way.
"I didn't think I'd be this upset if anything happened to her," Murray said. "But now Joyce is gone, and I'm not so cool with it. Instead of relaxing on the weekends, I'm out in the Dismal Swamp, looking for Joyce and fighting the flies."
Where a second ditch came in from the left, Murray paused to ask a man and woman with three dogs if they had seen a large tortoise.
"We saw a really big one going down into the water," the man said, and for half a minute Murray got excited until the woman said, "I guess maybe the same one that was there a couple weeks ago, sunning itself on a log."
"A couple weeks? Could it have been a week?" Murray asked.
"Two weeks," said the woman, and Murray knew it wasn't Joyce. She started walking again.
Joyce can travel quickly when she wants to, and she can be quite strong. She eats plants - romaine lettuce and white clover are favorites - and she would drown if she fell into the ditch, which Murray doesn't think likely because Joyce, she says, is smart enough to look down and back away from the drop.
"The first night she was gone I had a dream that I found her, but she was in the water. Then to find out that she's out here, with all this water... "
Murray prays to St. Anthony, patron saint of lost things and missing persons. A friend told her she had to mean it.
"I mean it," Murray said. "I really want her to come back."
Several hours in, Murray turned around. No footprints, no scrapes, no holes. Little pathways through crushed plants led nowhere. The only tracks in the mud were raccoon.
On the way out, about the 1-3/4-mile point, a cluster of zebra swallowtail butterflies rose off the road. They had been sitting on a cigar-shaped mound of droppings, black and fresh and full of plants and very smelly. It looked like Joyce had been there, and not very long before.
"Joyce!" Murray called into the woods. "Where are you? Joyce!"
But the tortoise, who does respond to her name, did not come.
"I'm not giving up," Murray said. "Maybe we'll find her even in a few years, when she's huge."
Joyce could live to 125, so Murray has provided for the tortoise in her will. She is not likely to starve, not here, not in summer.
Along the Washington Ditch, blackberries ripened and flowers bloomed. Joyce is somewhere among them. There is no one to rub her head while she stretches her neck for more, no one with cucumber treats. Joyce dug out of her big back yard to go wandering, Murray doesn't know why. For a family pet, the Dismal Swamp on the Fourth of July can bring just too much independence.
Missing turtle pulls a fast one, ends up in Great Dismal Swamp