How the Tortoise Cracked His Shell

If you were to stand in the southern woodlands of Nigeria during the dry season, you would hear the earth speaking. It does not speak in a whisper, but in the sharp, brittle crackle of fallen leaves, the dry rattle of empty seed pods in the wind, and the low hum of heat rising from the red clay. It is a beautiful country, a place where the forest meets the Savannah, and where the Igbo people have lived, farmed, and shared stories for more generations than anyone can count. The story we are telling today is one of the oldest and most famous of those tales. It is a story so beloved that Nigeria's great modern writers, who have traveled all over the earth and written books read by millions, have made sure to write this very legend down in their novels, preserving it like a jewel, so that the rest of the world can understand the wisdom of the forest. And like all old stories, it has been told in a hundred different ways, around a hundred different fires. But the heart of it remains as true today as it was when the first storyteller sat beneath an Aroko tree. Our story begins in a time of Ugani, a great and terrible famine. The rains had forgotten how to fall. The clouds, which usually rolled in heavy and dark from the sea to drench the hills, simply drifted by like thin white threads, keeping their water to themselves. In the villages of the animals, the harvest had been a sad affair. The yams, which should have been as thick as a man's thigh, were no bigger than a finger, dry and hairy in the hard dirt. The corn had withered on the stock before it could even grow silk. Because of this, the animals had grown thin. And when animals grow thin, their tempers grow short. The lion no longer roared with majesty. He grumbled. The leopard spent his days sleeping to forget his hunger, and the small forest dikers walked on legs that looked like dry twigs, searching in vain for a single green leaf. But of all the hungry creatures in the forest, none was hungrier, and none was more miserable than Embe, the tortoise. Now, you must understand that in those days, the tortoise did not look the way he does now. If you were to see Embe back then, you would have stared in admiration. His shell was not a rough, bumpy patchwork of gray and brown plates. No, it was a single, magnificent shield of polished slate, as smooth as a river stone, and as shiny as a black oil bean. When he walked, the sun glinted off his back like light on dark water. He was very proud of this shell, but he was even prouder of his mind. Embe was clever. He was so clever that he could see a trick coming from three villages away, and he could invent a new one before he had finished his morning bath. But Embe's cleverness had a problem. It was entirely at the service of his stomach. And right now, his stomach was as empty as an overturned pot. One afternoon, Embe sat outside his compound, leaning his smooth, shiny back against the clay wall. His wife, Alim, was inside, scraping the bottom of a mortar to see if there was even a grain of cassava dust left to make a meal. Suddenly, a shadow fell over Embe's face. He looked up, squinting into the bright hot sky. High above the trees, a flock of birds was gathering. They were not flying in their usual search of dry berries or muddy water holes. They were flying in a grand, excited circle, their feathers catching the light. There were eagles with wings like dark velvet, hawks with eyes like yellow beads, hornbills with great curved beaks, and bright green parrots who lived to talk. They were all calling out to one another, their voices full of a joy that had not been heard in the forest for months. "Did you hear?" cried the parrot, his voice cutting through the dry air. "The message has come…

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