Refugee tortoise leads an epic life

KATHY WEBB/ The Dominion Post

PRONE TO WATER: Ninety-one years after coming to New Zealand in a Gallipoli veteran's backpack, Torty is as limber as ever.

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She's war-wounded, battered and estimated to be well over a century old, but she still turns heads.

She's been run over by a gun carriage, stolen and put in a circus, and once made a bolt for freedom that nearly cost her her life.

Torty is probably also an illegal immigrant and overstayer, although immigration wasn't counting when she arrived in 1918.

She was just an ordinary Greek land tortoise, said to be decades old and leading a standard tortoise life in Salonica, Greece, during World War I when her life suddenly changed. She was run over by a French gun carriage.

Stewart Little, a Kiwi soldier who survived Gallipoli and moved on to Salonica, saw her go under the wheels and thought she must be dead. He was amazed when she lifted her head, pulled herself out of the dirt road, and struggled to her feet.

He nursed her back to health, and slipped her into his backpack when it was time to return home. When hibernating Torty awoke, she was in Dunedin.

Her next 90 years have brought successive adventures. In Dunedin she was stolen. Police were given descriptions of the tortoise with missing toes and gun-carriage grooves across her asymmetrical shell, which made her easily recognisable by an off-duty officer who took his son to the circus one day and spotted her.

Her next escapade came while living with her current owner, Beth, at Waimarama in Hawke's Bay several years ago. Freed from her enclosure to eat a clump of clover one day, she made a run for it.

"I took my eyes off her for 30 seconds, then looked around and she had gone, just like a toddler," Beth said.

She was found in hills far from home five days later by a woman who thought she had stubbed her toe on an unusually hard cow pat.

Torty, now plodding into her second century of life, is an eagerly sought-after guest at schools and clubs, and the star of a children's book.

Tortoises have been known to live for more than 200 years. Hastings tortoise expert Les Riddell said the extent to which Torty's shell healed meant she was probably still young and growing when she was run over by the gun carriage – but "young" was a relative term, as 100-year-old tortoises were still active and reproducing.

- © Fairfax NZ News