Turtle Wrangling (Part 1)

That's right, I said turtle wrangling!

I know, they're actually tortoises, but it just didn't have the same ring to it!
I'll obviously need to give a little background information in order to help explain the situation:

Well on this past Saturday I was helping a friend of mine who had just moved to a new place a little further out in the country. For the purpose of this story let's just call him "Rod". Rod is well known around these parts as an expert on Indian artifacts and is a pretty successful collector too. What folks may not know is that he is also known as "The Rat Guy". He got this designation because he raises rats and mice to sell to pet shops. Well among other things he also raises turtles, well OK tortoises actually, African Spur-Thigh tortoises. (sorry no photos yet, but hopefully in part two).

Now when I volunteered to help him with the move, believe me the furthest thing from my mind was that I would be "turtle wrangling". But, here I was on a nice Summer day driving fence posts into the ground to build a "Turtle Pen". We just needed to build a temporary structure so that Rod could get his two tortoises moved from one house to the next, and then he would work on the larger corral for them after that. So we marked off about a 100sq ft section of his pasture, complete with a nice shady spot, and started to work.

We completed the pen in a couple of hours and were now ready to head over to his old house to wrangle some turtles. Not really knowing what the proper atire was for "turtle wrangling", I sported a t-shirt, jeans, a pair of leather gloves, and a pair of steel toe hiking boots (I thought the Stetson might be pushing it a little, so I resisted the temptation).

We got over to his old house and headed to the back yard. The anticipation was killing me, hoping to wrangle my first turtle and get it safely transported to it's new home, but then bummer of all bummers as we approached an open gate. Yep, someone had left the gate open the previous evening while moving things from one house to the next.

We looked in all of their normal hiding places in the back yard, but found no turtles. So now our wrangling job had turned into a frantic search for a couple of enormous tortoises, roaming the neighborhood. One neighbor reported that another neighbor had said that a couple of guys had come to his house talking about seeing "the biggest Box Turtle you've ever seen" crossing the road a couple of blocks away. We head over to that neighbor's house, but no one is home! We make a couple of more passes around the neighborhood, but no sign of the two fugative tortoises.

To be continued (hopefully with photos)