There are four species of freshwater turtle native to Nova Scotia: the eastern painted, wood, Blanding’s, and common snapping. Of the four, only snapping turtles are known to regularly reach the age of 100. There was a snapping turtle, Grace, living wild in the Haliburton Highlands, who managed a solid 125 — until 2023, when her overwintering site was filled in and she was later found dead. There are no tortoises native to Nova Scotia. 

Halifax’s Museum of Natural History currently has four turtles in captivity: two eastern painted turtles, one wood turtle and one gopher tortoise. They all have names, though you wouldn’t know it if you asked the average museum visitor. In that regard, there’s only Gus. 

Gus is a gopher tortoise. He’s 104 years old, which makes him the oldest known gopher tortoise to ever live. He is also something of a local celebrity — fame-wise, I’d say he ranks somewhere between Joel Plaskett and that horrifying talking Christmas tree at Mic Mac Mall. He’s native to Florida, but was purchased from a reptile institute in the ‘40s. He’s been in Halifax ever since. 

Gus is not my favourite animal at the museum, but he’s certainly up there. This is mostly because he never bites me, except by accident, and because cleaning his enclosure is more akin to scooping kitty litter than dangling over open water while elbow-deep in reptile excrement, dodging the clumsy snapping of an endlessly hungry turtle around the net. He’s also a herbivore, which means feeding him invites no retaliatory nightmares of a giant cricket plucking you from your home, dusting you in calcium powder, and feeding you to a salamander. 

Besides “can I touch him?” the most common question visitors asked me during Gus’ daily walk this summer was probably, “Does he know you?” Despite its frequency, this never failed to catch me off guard. Mostly because I could never be sure what they were actually asking me. What does it mean, for a tortoise to know you?  

“Well,” I’d say, on my better days: “He wouldn’t eat from my hand a month ago.”

Usually, the visitor would settle, appeased by this. The acceptance of food meant familiarity — which, for a reptile, is generally the closest one can get to love. 

On worse days, (never to a child, I must preface, at the risk of seeming heartless) I would say “I don’t know. He’s not a dog. I just feed him.” 

Much to my surprise, this tended to appease them just as well. Gus didn’t need to know me back, or even necessarily recognize me — and, by extension, he didn’t need to know them. Gus is a tortoise — famously only slightly more reactionary than a socially inclined moss ball. The indifference, I imagine, has to be part of the appeal. You can lie in the museum backyard and watch him steadily and methodically chow down on grass for what feels like hours. He will not once acknowledge you. 

In the three months I spent working at the museum, I tried to get to the bottom of the whole thing: the cult of Gus. It’s a weird thing to dive into, at times risking veering into the realm of the philosophical. What is celebrity, anyways? Why should I care about a turtle that could never, in 104 years, care about me? 

What makes Gus more important than Grace? 

You can find the lunar calendar in the shapes on a turtle’s shell; you can measure time through the counting of scutes. Not Gus’. He’s missing a few around the edges – skipping a few days of the month. Maybe that’s what’s let him live so long. 

Eternalism is the proposition that every moment in history — past, present, future — exists simultaneously, somewhere, without condition. Time isn’t fluid: it’s a static, solid block. Everything, everywhere, is happening right now. And sometimes, if you’re very lucky, you can slip between states; you can have one foot in the present, one foot in the past; you can sketch out the superimposition of moments. You can stroll the boardwalk, see boats on the harbour, see your ancestors first step out onto Pier 21, see shiphands loading munitions below deck. You can go to the Museum of Natural History, study the slope of a tortoise’s shell, watch four generations of people do the same, and watch an animal break its way carefully through the shell of an egg, toddle blinking into over a century of sun. You can sit and watch a tortoise eat a strawberry from some guy’s hand in 2026, and know that if you stepped just a little to the side, you’d see the exact same thing happening 84 years before. 

Gus is living history, then—a constant, steady touchstone in a rambling mess of future, past, and present; a lifetime of a city, and this one tortoise at the center of it all. Maybe, in a decade or two, I might join Gus on his walk, and say to the hapless student worker the words I heard so many times this summer, from parents to children, grandparents to grandchildren: 

You know, when I was your age…