Selah woman relieved to recover pet tortoise

SELAH, Yakima County– Speedy the tortoise is home again after a week and a half on the lam, and owner Norma Lind couldn't be happier.

The sulcata land tortoise, about 11/2 feet long, 1 foot wide and 34 pounds, was spotted Friday evening along a fence beside Interstate 82 north of this town north of Yakima, Lind said.

She credited Charlie Blevins of Gleed and his chocolate Labrador retriever, Maddy, for helping her find the wayward tortoise, who got loose by knocking over part of a cinderblock corral outside the home Lind shares with her husband off State Route 821.

She had offered a $500 reward, but Blevins turned it down.

"As a fellow pet lover, I just wanted to help," he said.

He said he read about the missing tortoise in the Yakima Herald-Republic and took his dog in an all-terrain vehicle to help Lind with her search, eventually following a trail of crushed grass along the fence for about a mile and a half.

The dog lost the track, but Lind, a construction flagger who got the tortoise from her husband as a Christmas present in 2002, kept her eyes peeled and eventually saw something moving in the distance.

"The closer I got, I realized it was my baby. I know to a lot of people that might sound crazy — how you can love a tortoise so much? — but he's like a child to my husband and I," she said. "My life is complete again."