Younger tortoises—or perhaps less retrospective tortoises—will say that it's simply in your nature to distrust that particularly irritating species you've come to know as humans. After all, they are far taller than you are, and unnaturally fast, given their size and those thick thighs of theirs. Always scurrying about like lizards, except much more likely to teeter over at any moment and break their fragile skin. But it's silly to ascribe that pervasive suspicion to something as vague as nature. It's in your nature to eat and sleep and travel and breed, of course, as it is for any creature. A mistrust of humans is, as you yourself see it, common sense.

After all, it is hard to forget a childhood characterized by constant paranoia. You can still recall those blasted hunters that invaded the island when you were young, killing indiscriminately. You would sleep, and when you woke, half your friends would be gone. So it goes. Fields of fractured shells with nothing but ghosts inside of them. This, you remember thinking, was not how you wanted to find out what a shell looks like separated from its tortoise.

Suddenly your shell was not the impenetrable shield you'd always considered it to be. Friends and family vanished around you, and you continued, because there was nothing to do but continue until you were picked off like the rest. You walked, you slept. You wondered how another creature might deal with the same situation. Run? To where? Perhaps somewhere in the world, there were bigger islands that one could lose themself in. Perhaps the unending swarms of humans came from one of these giant islands.

The prospect of staging some sort of offensive was unthinkable, even embarrassing. How could you possibly think to harm such spry creatures? Waiting for them to trip over you with their spindly legs? No, you are better than they are. You don't attack. You would never think to kill another creature. (Unlike some of your peers, who think they're clever for crushing the friendly finches who hop underneath their bellies to clear their legs of ectoparasites.) You wait, and you walk, and you hope.

They trampled through the vegetation as if they lived there, carving paths that had no purpose but destruction. Clearing away tracts of valuable forest and replacing it with rows of unappetizing shoots. Disgraceful behavior, if you do say so yourself. Every good tortoise knows the importance of a well-worn path. You can't count the number of times you've had to mentally re-map the island in your head. Of course, some of it is as easy as knowing the beach from the volcanic hills—where there's rain, there's fresh grass, and where there's fresh grass, there's food.

But not for long. No, humans were not the only devilish creature that sprung from those floating contraptions all those years ago. The goats were, in some ways, even worse. They were more like you than the humans were—you were no longer dealing with a completely alien threat, and yet you were still powerless to stop them. They were four-legged, like you—ate plants, like you—but they ate more, and they were faster, and they were taller, and could stick their ugly, furry mouths in places that you couldn't. They didn't even seem to sleep at all! In the end, that was what truly doomed the noble tortoise race. The goats and their damned appetite. They pranced up the trails you had so lovingly carved, with no respect whatsoever for fair competition, or for your paths, or for your island. They could not be reasoned with! Surely eating so fast and sleeping so little would have made them collapse, and you certainly hoped that they would.

The goats... you cannot stress how much they felt like a personal insult. You tortoises have perfected the ideal lifestyle. You are the masters of the island. You have been evolving this way for more years than you can count. You go about your business with a strong sense of purpose, of destination. You value the journey. You value the calm and the meditative. The birds, the insects—they flit around from place to place, and you get the sense that they're not grounded enough; they don't appreciate the everyday sights. And here were these gangling mammals, who were trying to do the exact same thing that you were—eat the exact same things you were—except doing it in the most disrespectful way possible! Couldn't they slow down a little? Couldn't they think for a moment? They got to the food, but not because they were patient and spent the effort to get there! Their speed gave them the upper hand! They beat you at your own game!

Not to mention that they weren't from the island in the first place. They were visitors, and they should have behaved as such. No respect at all.

You have many feelings about goats.

Miraculously, the humans were the ones to solve the goat problem. Somewhere in between almost driving you to extinction and removing the goats from the island, they decided that, shockingly, the genocide of tortoises was wrong. You have come to believe that this was in fact a different group of humans than the ones who slaughtered your friends. Perhaps even an entirely new generation? You can't be sure; humans seem rather short-lived and easy to fell, though you think some have been observed to live as long as tortoises.

You have never directly interacted with any of these new, benign humans, but you've heard tales from friends—of a huge, scary enclosure where they take tortoises who are sick, then release them back to their homes when they're healed. Those who have been there describe this building as startlingly artificial and alien, but not altogether unwelcoming. Some awkward poking and prodding happens, but never killing. You don't have much of an opinion on it, honestly. You suppose you should be grateful for the work they've done in bringing you back from the brink of extinction. And you are, of course. But, again, it is hard to forgive them for putting you there in the first place.

Although you are certainly one to remember the past, you've decided it's not too productive to dwell on it much. The life of the tortoise is focused on the day to day.

Today, humans are simply a nuisance. You've grown used to them turning up in droves to blink bright, annoying lights at you, but at least they keep a respectful distance. Single humans occasionally come closer, but rarely touch you. Once, one attached a hard, white object to the shell of one of your friends. No one paid it much notice; he didn't even notice it much himself. It's hard to bring yourself to care about things like this. You don't know what they mean, but the mystery isn't important.

Perhaps one of the strangest—yet most pervasive, and also most infuriating—behaviors of the humans is their need to construct imperfect, arbitrary barriers in the middle of your territory. You've accepted that they've been turning your island into their island for a long time now, making the whole thing more accessible for the human lifestyle. Or so you suppose. You don't know how their huge wooden boxes help their lifestyle at all, but there sure are a lot of them, so they must have some importance. Other than taking over your land, though, these structures aren't doing anything particularly offensive. But you draw the line at fences—put up out in the real world, where most of you tortoises make your homes.

You've never seen a real human actually building a fence, but no other creature has the strength, dexterity, or motivation to make something so complicated and yet so useless. You and your kin have puzzled over the meaning of these wooden barriers for as long as they've been around. Do humans, perhaps, stand on them to be taller and see more of the land around them? They're already very tall as it is; surely they don't need even more height. Could they serve as a kind of itch scratching post? Do humans eat the moss that grows on them?

Due to these fences and other human-made constructions, you've had to change your migration paths considerably. The most perturbing of these changes was when Migration Trail West-A was blocked off by an entirely new type of fence—an unnecessarily intricate one made of hard, thin wires woven together like grass. It took days to figure out how to get around it.

But in the end, despite your distrust, and despite the mystery of the fences or the ever-growing human population, there are sights that give you genuine hope. You once saw a group of about a dozen humans carrying a group of young tortoises through the Great Southern Grass Field. One by one, they placed them down, and retreated to watch the young'uns explore the unfamiliar territory. Later, you went up to one tortoise and asked her what was going on. She didn't know the details, but she told you that many more young tortoises were on the way—all hatched and cared for by the humans. There might have been hundreds, she reckoned.

Hundreds! It's hard to comprehend such a large number!

You decided that such a sight gave you genuine hope.