TFA 5: The Story of the Tortoise

          The story of the Tortoise was merely a child's story.  The story told of a tortoise that wished to fly with the birds, but they never let him for he was not liked by the birds.  When he changed his ways, each bird gave him a feather from which he made two wings.  The tortoise flew with them to a feast, yet he cheated them to get most of the food.  The birds were enraged by this and each took a feather back so that the tortoise no longer had two wings and was trapped in the clouds where the feast had taken place.  The tortoise had asked the parrot to go and tell the tortoise's wife to lay everything soft in the house out in the lawn so that he could safely jump from the clouds.  However, the parrot told the wife to lay every hard object in the house into the lawn.  The tortoise saw the wife working from his pirch on the cloud, but was too far away to see what she was moving.  Thinking he was jumping onto a pile of soft items, he let himself fall from the sky.  He landed on the hard objects and shattered his shell.  The local medicine man managed to gather the pieces and put the shell together again.  This is why the tortoise does not have a smoothe shell.  The story explains why a tortoise looks the way it does.  This story also seems to forshaddow a later portion of the book.