Stimpunks Foundation × More Realms · L★S · Field Guide No. 11

A Field Guide to
Being a Tortoise

Twelve land tortoises, and an arc that runs from the Moon to a graveyard to a beginning. The first animals to go around the Moon and come back were two tortoises, and they beat every human there by two months. Then: a burrow that houses 350 other species, a shell full of holes, a vegetarian that hunted, an animal that hatched around 1832 and is still eating grass. And then four whose endings are not yet facts.

L★S
How to use this guide Each entry gives a tortoise, what it actually does, how a default reading misreads it ("sounds like / actually"), and full field notes. Click any entry to open its notes.
Tortoise is not the opposite of turtle Testudinidae — the land tortoises — is a real family, and everything here belongs to it. But the everyday words don't carve it cleanly: American English calls the whole order turtles and tortoises a kind of turtle; British English splits tortoise (land), turtle (sea) and terrapin (fresh water). Both are fine. Neither is the taxonomy. The companion is Field Guide No. 10, and the Mojave desert tortoise lives over there.
Why the last four are marked Not because they are sadder. Because they are unfinished — sentences somebody is still writing, or just finished writing. One of them closed in 2012. One reopened in 2019. The dashed edge means the outcome was, or is, a decision.
The guide

Twelve tortoises

Ordered on purpose. It opens in space, moves through the ordinary astonishments of a slow land animal, and ends with the four entries where what happens next is a choice. The last one is a tortoise from one ocean doing a dead tortoise's job in another, and it is working.

Not: Not slow as a moral. Slowness is a strategy with a bill attached — see No. 34. Not armour. The pancake tortoise's shell is full of holes and it is the best climber of them all. Not settled. "Tortoises are herbivores" held until somebody filmed one hunting, and "it inflates in the crevice" is now thought to be wrong. Not a mascot. Testudinidae is among the most trafficked families on Earth; loving the shape is not the same as leaving the animal a hillside. Not inevitable. Pinta closed. Fernandina reopened. Île aux Aigrettes is 529 hatchlings that did not have to happen.
Star stuff, on land

Every tortoise here is built from star-forged calcium and carbon, and each spends it on ribs and vertebrae grown wide and fused — bone that turns pressure into charge, which is where this collection began, in Bone Song (No. 1). Two of them were carried around the far side of the Moon in 1968 and came home to be weighed. The star stuff went and had a look, and it was a tortoise.