Years ago when our oldest son was just over two years old and I was seven months pregnant with our second, we had to sell our entire flock of chickens because we were moving to town.
When the people came to pick up the chickens Darcy was at work. The couple took in my enormous belly and the toddler wrapped around my knee and insisted I just point the way to the coop and they would take it from there.
For the next couple weeks I kept having a dream—or more like a nightmare—that they had left some chickens behind and now they were out in the coop without any feed or water.
I finally had to struggle through the snow drifts to see for myself that the coop was, indeed, empty. Years later when we had sheep I would dream that I had left a ewe in the barn after lambing and forgot about her.
The flock had long since left the winter corral to graze on the hillside, but in my dream somehow this poor ewe and her pair of lambs had been abandoned in their stall. Of course the barn was empty.
Once I talked to a rancher who admitted having the same type of dream about leaving a cow locked in a barn for months.
Another had actually left a horse in a barn by itself for almost a week. He thought his brother was looking after it, and the brother thought he was.
Thankfully the horse survived by licking frost off the window, but it still left the brothers—and no doubt the horse—shaken.
Just a couple weeks ago I dreamt I had forgotten to feed the fish in our aquarium. In my dream the fish were still alive, but the half the water had evaporated from their tank and when I rushed to feed them they were ferocious in their hunger. We haven’t even had an aquarium for almost a decade. At least I hope we haven’t.
The worst thing that ever really happened was when Shoeless the cat went missing for a day and a half.
On the afternoon of day two I opened the door to the storage shed and a blur of fur sailed past my ankles. To this day Shoeless keeps a wary distance whenever I open the shed door. Strangely enough, I never even dreamt he was in the shed.
I just read about a story that makes all these dreams—and even the story about the poor horse and Shoeless the cat’s day and a half in the shed—pale in comparison.
This story is about Manuela, a pet tortoise who disappeared from her home In Rio De Janeiro in 1982 while the house was undergoing renovations.
The family carried out a lengthy search but finally came to the sad conclusion that one of the construction workers must have left the front door open and the tortoise had somehow walked away.
Thirty years later, Leonel the father, passed away and his four children began the difficult task of cleaning out their childhood home.
Most daunting of all, was the second-floor storage room their father had filled with electrical items.
His daughter recalled how her father had been in the habit of bringing broken things home, with the idea of fixing them.
“‘If he found an old television he thought he might be able to use a part of it to fix another one in the future, so he just kept accumulating things. We never dared go inside that room,” she said.
Leonel’s son, Leandro had just finished packing a box containing a broken record player to the curb when a neighbor who was watching the proceedings inquired, “Are you throwing the tortoise out too?”
Sure enough, there was Manuela in the box, thirty years older but still very much alive. The children were thrilled to have their pet back, but shocked at how he managed to survive for 30 years in the storage room.
Apparently red-footed tortoises can go for long periods without eating and have been known to survive for two to three years without any food at all...but three decades?
The only plausible explanation is that Manuela survived by eating termites from the wooden components of the old television and radio sets and perhaps from the wooden floors.
So if you’ve ever had a pet tortoise go missing, you might want to be a bit more thorough during the upcoming spring cleaning. You never know what you might find. I, on the other hand, am pretty sure what I am going to dream about tonight.
Shannon McKinnon is a humour columnist from Northern BC. You can read past columns by visiting www.shannonmckinnon.com