The Race the Tortoise Refused

"I'll give you a head start of a hundred years," the hare said, grinning at the tortoise across the meadow, "and I'll still win before lunch."

The tortoise, whose name was Delia, did not look up from the clover she was chewing. She had heard some version of this joke her whole long life. Everyone in the meadow knew the story about her kind, the one where the hare naps and the tortoise wins by luck and the hare's own foolishness. She was tired of being a punchline dressed up as a moral.

"No thank you," she said.

The hare, whose name was Jasper, laughed so hard he fell over in the grass. "Scared?"

"Bored," Delia said, and kept chewing.

But word got around, as it does in meadows, and soon the rabbits and the squirrels and the old crow in the oak were saying the tortoise was afraid, that maybe the old story wasn't even true, that tortoises had only ever won because somebody made it up.

Delia thought about that for three days, which for a tortoise is not very long at all.

On the fourth day she found Jasper lounging by the creek. "I'll race you," she said. "But not your way. My way."

Jasper sat up, delighted. "Any way you like. I'll still win."

"The race is not to the oak tree," Delia said. "The race is to the sea. There are no rules about resting or napping. You may do anything you like. I only ask one thing of myself, and that is that once I start, I do not stop."

Jasper laughed again, because it sounded like nothing at all. The sea was two long days away even at a dead run. What did it matter if she never stopped? She was still a tortoise.

They started at dawn. Jasper shot off in a blur of dust and was gone before the birds finished their first song. Delia put one foot down, and then the other, and did not look at the horizon, because the horizon never got closer by looking at it.

By midday Jasper was far ahead, sunning himself on a warm rock, congratulating himself to a family of chipmunks. By evening he had eaten three meals, taken two naps, and chased a butterfly for an hour just because he could. Delia walked. The sun moved. She walked through the heat and then through the cool and then through the dark, one foot, then the other, never fast, never stopping. Somewhere in the black middle of the night her legs begged to fold under her shell, and the grass looked soft, and stopping would have cost her nothing that anyone would ever see. She kept walking. She had asked one thing of herself, and she meant to give it.

Jasper woke at dawn on the second day, stretched, and decided he had plenty of time. He wandered off to visit friends. He told the story of the race so many times, laughing, that he lost track of how long the telling took.

Delia walked all through that second day too, past the pond where Jasper napped, past the friends who cheered for her without quite believing she'd finish, and as the sun dropped low and orange over the water, she put one more foot down, and it landed in sand.

She was still standing at the edge of the sea, feeling the cool tide reach her feet, when Jasper came bounding up, breathless, three hours later, having finally remembered there was a race at all.

He stared at her, and for once said nothing.

Slow only wins when it keeps going.