The direction it was going

A car stops on a country road for no reason anyone behind it can see. The hazard lights come on. A man gets out in his work boots and walks back along the verge, looking at the tarmac like someone who dropped a coin.

It is a turtle. It has been crossing for some time.

He lifts it the way the leaflets show, a hand on each side of the shell, well back from the head, and it pulls in its legs and considers him from inside.

Watch what he does next. He does not carry it back to the side it came from, which is nearer, and where his car is. He carries it on, the way it was facing, across to the far ditch, because the advice is that a turtle put back where it started will only try again.

So he takes its side. He does not know what is over there. Perhaps neither does the turtle. He only knows which way it was leaning.

He sets it down in the grass facing the same direction, and waits a moment to see it go, and it does not go, because it is a turtle, and he is standing right there.

The cars behind him have stopped too. Nobody sounds a horn. A woman in the second car has wound her window down to watch, the way you watch anyone carry anything carefully.