Back in the early seventies, when we moved to Todd County, I found myself with a fascination most kids didn’t think twice about—box turtles. For those who don’t know, a box turtle is that special kind that can close itself up completely, drawing every bit of its body inside the shell until it looks like nothing more than a living stone.
My dad used to tell me a story that stuck with me. He said my grandpa once picked up a turtle and carved a date into the underside of its shell with his pocketknife. Decades later—nearly thirty years down the road—he came across that very same turtle again. That’s when I realized just how long these creatures could live—some up to 80 years, maybe more. It gave me the feeling that every turtle I picked up had a history longer than I could imagine, and a future that might outlast me.
Before long, my neighbor Philip Williams caught the bug too, and the two of us made a habit of combing the woods, always on the hunt for turtles. I probably had around thirty at one point. To keep them, I built a pen in the apple orchard—fifty feet by fifty feet, with wooden walls about two feet high. I sank a big metal pan into the ground so it was level with the earth, and that became their watering hole.
The orchard was heaven for them. Every year the apples would fall, and the turtles had more than they could ever eat. In springtime, I’d watch as they buried their eggs, and later, I’d see the tiny ones emerging to take their place among the older turtles. It felt like its own little community, a secret world tucked away under the apple trees.
I kept them for years. They became part of the rhythm of the farm, as familiar to me as the orchard itself. But when the time came to leave that place, I knew I couldn’t take them with me. One by one, I let them go, watching them crawl back into the woods where I had first found so many of them. I said farewell, and though I moved on, I often wonder how many are still alive out there, slowly roaming the fields and forests of Todd County.
Something in me believes most of them are. Maybe every now and then, someone else stumbles across one of “my” turtles, not knowing it once lived in an apple orchard paradise a boy had built just for them.