The Race the Tortoise Refused

"A hundred years is my offer," the hare said, "a hundred-year head start, and I'll still be at the oak before lunch." The tortoise went on chewing her clover; her name was Delia, and the joke had been made at her every summer of a long life.

"No, thank you," she said. "You don't know the terms. I've heard that offer every summer since I was a hatchling, and it never improves." The hare's name was Jasper, and he laughed until he went over in the grass. "Scared?" he said. "Bored," Delia said.

The meadow's view was that she was frightened. The fact was that she was eating. By the third day the crow had improved on it. "She's frightened," the crow said, "and I'll tell you something else: there was never any tortoise, and somebody made the story up so the slow ones would feel better." Delia turned it over for three days, which for a tortoise is no time at all.

On the fourth day she found Jasper asleep by the creek. "I'll race you," she said, "but not your way, mine." He waved a paw without opening his eyes, agreeing to terms he had not heard. "The finish isn't the oak," Delia said. "The finish is the sea. Rest when you want. I ask one thing of myself, which is that once I start, I do not stop." Jasper said that was a walk, not a race, and she would be done by the second field. She said it was the one on offer. The sea was two days off at a dead run.

They started at dawn, and Jasper went off like a thrown stone and was out of sight before the birds had finished. By noon the meadow had it that the race was over. Jasper was asleep on a warm rock. He came back down the road to look at her, because it was funny. "You've done a field," he said. "I've done a field." "There are eleven more, and you could still stop, and nobody would say a word about it." "Somebody always says a word about it." He went off after a butterfly.

Delia walked.

The sun went over and came down, and she walked through the heat and then the cool and then into the dark, one foot and then the other, and she never looked at the horizon, because looking never brought it closer. Somewhere past midnight her legs went, and the grass was soft, and nothing was watching but a moon that would not tell. "Once I start," she said, to nobody at all, "I do not stop." The rabbits said afterwards that this was where she must have rested. She did not rest.

Jasper woke at dawn on the second day with time in hand. "Has she gone past?" he asked the pond. "Hours ago," a frog said, "she went by while you were asleep." "Hours is nothing." He told the story of the race so many times that the telling outlasted the race.

Delia came past the pond and did not wake him, which the squirrels called strategy, though she was walking, and waking him would have meant stopping. Friends came out to the road. "You're nearly there," a squirrel said, which was not true. "I'm not," Delia said, "I'm still walking." "She's going to do it," a rabbit said, out loud, which nobody had said yet. She walked all that second day, and the sun dropped low and orange over the water, and she put one more foot down and it crunched into wet sand.

Jasper came up the beach three hours later, breathless, having at last recalled there was a race. The meadow settled on the view that he had thrown it to be kind.

He stood in the sand with the tide sloshing over his feet and said nothing at all.

Slow only wins when it keeps going.