Had I noticed a chiton on my first day on the beach, I would have dismissed it as a small rough patch, not an animal but a defect of the rock. Now I understood it to be a single-footed creature whose simple plates of armor had served to protect its species since practically the beginning of the earth. Chitons came in different colors, and I wondered why some were red and some were brown and some were yellow or gray or green. I speculated as to whether the pigments in their food somehow tinted their skin and whether their colors camouflaged them from predators. They appeared to stay still, yet I knew from observing them in the tub that they somehow moved across the rock, leaving in their wake a path cleared of algae, which I supposed they must be eating. They were primitive creatures, but even so, they knew enough to curl their armor around their vulnerable undersides when they were pried away from their homes. First I sketched the little creature as it flattened itself against a rock, and then I tried without success to tug it gently off its base, so as to make it roll up like a pill bug.
