A couple months ago, back in June, Rob and I noticed an Eastern box turtle floating in our little homemade backyard pond. Rob became concerned because box turtles are land turtles and, he’d read, are not strong swimmers.

“Maybe she fell in and she can’t get out,” he worried.

“Well, she could get out if she went over to the shallow end,” I suggested. (She was currently floating in the pond’s deep end.) “After all, the water’s only a couple inches high over there.”

“Hmm,” Rob said, “but maybe she doesn’t know there’s a shallow end. Maybe she’s been over here in the deep end for a long time now, trying to get out, and she’s getting tired. Maybe I should help her get out just to be safe.”

“Yeah, I see what you’re saying,” I said. “That’s probably a good idea.”

So he fished the little turtle out of the water and set her in the ferns at the pond’s edge.

Then we went in the house to have lunch, and when we returned, the turtle was back in the pond, floating contentedly in the deep end again.

“I’ll build her some steps over here at the shallow end,” Rob said, and he set to work building three stone steps that led out of the water. “I just want to make sure she can get out okay.”

After the steps were built, the turtle continued floating, and we sat there among the ferns, watching her, as the bullfrogs croaked and the goldfish darted about in the sunlit water. She seemed quite at her ease.

“I’m still worried that she might not know there’s a shallow end,” Rob said after a while. “Maybe I could entice her over to this side with a little watermelon snack. That way, we could test the steps and see if she can really use them.”

“Good plan,” I said.

So Rob went in the house and rustled up some nice ripe, sweet, fragrant watermelon chunks and arranged them at the top of the new steps he’d built. The turtle smelled the watermelon right away and swam (surprisingly quickly) to the shallow end. She clambered to the top of Rob’s steps, a bit of hornwort draped about her neck like a boa, and began to feast.

“Well,” Rob said, “she’s definitely proven that she can negotiate the steps. The steps are no problem for her.”

But still he worried. The next day he found her in the deep end again.

“What if she forgot about the steps and the shallow end?” he said. “What if she’s not all that smart?”

“Well,” I said, “I guess we could remind her about the steps. We could remind her with some more watermelon.”

So, once again, Rob enticed the turtle to the little stone steps with watermelon chunks, and, once again, she demonstrated her ability to easily climb out of the pond on her own.

But Rob continued to fret. He kept reading about box turtles on the internet, and every article seemed to confirm that box turtles are clumsy swimmers (they don’t have webbed feet) and won’t hang out in anything but the shallowest water for any length of time. Yet our turtle wasn’t conforming. She was floating in three to four feet of water for long spells, for hours at a stretch.

“I hope she’s okay,” Rob would say.

“Well, she looks happy,” I’d say.

Finally, after we’d observed her floating in the pond every day for a week and had forced her to demonstrate her water-exiting skills countless times by luring her to shore with fresh melon treats, Rob let himself relax a little.

As she floated among the hornwort on a warm June day, he announced, “Well, I know what her name is now. It’s Ariel. She’s the Little Mermaid, and she’s doing just fine in the pond. She’s here because she wants to be, and I think she’s going to be all right.”

Rob’s prediction proved correct. Now, almost three months later, we still see Ariel every day. She’s been enjoying the pond all the hot summer long, and she seems to be thriving.