On one of these warm days in early October I hear a slow dragging in the leaves, and come upon a box turtle eating a mushroom. They have beautifully patterned shells, ocher or yellow, sometimes orange, and dusty black, almost batik in design, with many variations. I stand about eight feet away, while it holds its head and neck straight up, watching me. I guess it to be a male, by the bright red little eyes. The eyes of a female are a darker reddish brown. [Illustration] His wrinkled red neck pulses a little. His yellow beak and curved mouth line are tight shut under his flat-topped head, with bits of mushroom sticking out on either side. Very comical, he looks; but he stares down any inclination in me to laugh out loud. He watches me without moving for a full fifteen minutes before I get tired of the experiment and go away. Nothing, he seems to realize, can outlast a box turtle. This old male, with his wrinkled red jowls, and his soft, puddled-looking feet, must represent some antediluvian complacency, or, for all I know, a reasonable pride. In captivity box turtles have exceeded forty years before they died, and some grow to be much older than that, if they avoid being crushed on the highways or killed by forest fires, since they are otherwise invulnerable to most predators, excepting man. This year a box turtle was found locally by a man whose deceased relative had carved his initials on its shell in 1889, making the turtle seventy-one years old. How old the turtle was when so tagged is not known. They are wanderers--more so, for example, than the water turtles, and with a certain assurance. Within their chosen environment, of open field, shrubby slope, or marsh periphery, they cover a great deal of ground. They seem to carry a staying power with them, and an ancient decorum. They are like old natives true to ancestral places. There is something enviable about this fittingness to home. Still, I have enough modern restlessness or rootlessness in me to think that a home or piece of land probably has fewer boundaries than ever before. We are going to have to know our location “way out,” as some of the old Cape Codders used to say. I have an equal envy of the terns that are flying toward the Caribbean or the Antarctic. They are birds of the world, in which they know their direction by markers that are light-years away, or so some scientists believe after much investigation. The latest theory is that migrating birds find their way by the sun’s changing position during daylight hours and by some of the constellations at night. They have a built-in mastery of what it took many thousands of years for man to learn, with his surpassing intellect. They are readers of the stars. Their home is in the wide blind sky. _The Field of Learning_