She crawled along for ten or twelve hours each day, swimming rivers and ponds, sinking deep into the mud of bogs, climbing hills and crossing sandy plains where the sun at midday scorched terribly. In his fever the man kept calling for water; and it was very trying to the poor tortoise to have to get the man off her back each time while she went looking for a drink for him. But she struggled forward just the same, and each night she knew she was that much nearer to Buenos Aires.
But the tortoise, after days and days of this toil, understood that her own strength was giving out. She did not complain, but she began to be afraid that she would die before getting the hunter to a place of safety. And one morning, in fact, she was so tired she was quite unable to move.
“Here I am dying all alone in the woods!” the man moaned from his bag. “No one will help me get to Buenos Aires! Oh, oh, I shall die here all alone!”
You see, the man had been unconscious all the time, and thought he was still lying in the shelter, away back in the mountains.
The words stirred the weary tortoise to fresh effort. She got the man up on her back again and went on.
But the moment came when she could not take another step forward. She had not been eating for some days, because she had not dared take the time for hunting. Now she was too weak to do even that. So she drew her legs into her shell and closed her eyes, waiting for death to come, and mourning inside her turtle-heart that she had failed in saving the life of the man who had befriended her.
The sun went down and night fell. As the turtle chanced to open her eyes, she was surprised to see a reddish glow on the distant horizon; and she heard a voice—the voice of a wharf rat—talking near by. The rat was saying:
“My, what a turtle, what a turtle! I never saw such a big one in my life! And what is that on her back? A cord of wood?”
The poor turtle did not know that those lights came from Buenos Aires, and that the rat was a citizen of that town, out for a night’s foraging in the fields of the suburbs.
“It is not a cord of wood,” the turtle murmured, “It is a man, a sick man!”