Age 8
Sabio was a tortoise, and he had lived with Dylan’s family for years. He was small and slow and had a habit of finding hiding spots nobody expected — behind boxes, under couches, in the back of cabinets. When Papa brought him inside one Monday night and tucked him in a towel, everything seemed fine.
In the morning, Sabio was gone.
All week they looked. Papa moved boxes and checked under the couch and opened every cabinet. Dylan said he hadn’t moved him. The doors had been kept closed. Nobody could explain it.
Then, a week later, someone called. They’d found a tortoise on Gopher Canyon Road — about a mile away. Uninjured. Sabio had gotten outside somehow and made the whole journey on tortoise legs: farm roads, fences, cactus hedges, strawberry fields, pumpkin fields, uphill and downhill, and at some point across a road with traffic. In a week.
They drove to get him.