September 8th

 
Today I found a turtle. I think it’s called a leatherback turtle. I found one once before,
but it was dead. This one has been washed up alive. Father had sent me down to collect
driftwood on Rushy Bay. He said there’d be plenty about after a storm like that. He was
right. I’d been there for half an hour or so heaping up the wood, before I noticed the
turtle in the tideline of piled seaweed. I thought at first he was just a washed-up tree
stump covered in seaweed.
 
He was upside down on the sand. I pulled the seaweed off him. His eyes were open,
unblinking. He was more dead than alive, I thought. His flippers were quite still, and
held out to the clouds above as if he was worshipping them. He was massive, as long as
this bed, and wider. He had a face like a two hundred year old man, wizened and
wrinkled and wise with a gently-smiling mouth.
 
I looked around, and there were more gulls gathering. They were silent, watching,
waiting; and I knew well enough what they were waiting for. I pulled away more of the
seaweed and saw that the gulls had been at him already. There was blood under his neck
where the skin had been pecked. I had got here just in time. I bombarded the gulls with
pebbles and they flew off protesting noisily, leaving me alone with my turtle.