So I'm driving along

and I suddenly get a strong feeling that something is going to dart out in front of the car. So I slow down (having learnt to listen to intuition) and turn onto Man O'War, and I think maybe I was wrong, and start singing to the radio, and there it is--moving so slowly I almost didn't see it moving at all.

So maybe I was wrong about the darting, but I did manage to avoid the baby tortoise that was making its way across a four lane highway. Avoiding a tortoise is somewhat harder to do than you might think, since it's not running away from the car. You pretty much have to straddle the tortoise and hope no wheels make contact. I managed to aim the car so he/she was dead centre (or should I say live centre--sorry it's late and my sense of humour is off). I just hope the rest of the cars out there in the middle of the night managed to avoid it, too. It's dark, but it's also full moon, so maybe that will help.

When I used to drive up to Owenton to visit my grandmother, there was a time in the spring when the road was full of hundreds of tortoises--some dead, some living, as they moved from one area to another. It was a bit of an obstacle course but I managed not to hit any, to my knowledge. I've only hit one animal before, a black cat (on Friday the 13th, at midnight, right after friends played with a Ouija board, no less). It was unavoidable, but I was hysterical for the better part of an hour. I thought it was my friends' cat, so I took it up there, to their house, thinking too that one was an RN who might be able to help it until I could take it to the emergency hospital. But it died in my arms on the way, and I wound up breaking down in their living room. They finally got me calmed down so I could go on home. The guy took care of the cat and then went around the next day searching for the owner. It turns out it was a randy un-neutered male that had just moved to the neighbourhood and wasn't used to the traffic. Still, I felt awful.

But at least the little tortoise was still plugging away across the road the last time I saw it.

This little guy in the video goes a lot faster, but it's relaxing to watch and the birdsong is nice, too. The leaves look like magnolia, which isn't surprising as the person who filmed it lives in Florida.