On an interstate highway between Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz., drivers on their morning commute called 911 to report a runaway. A very … very … slow one.

He was miles from home and ambling across the four-lane highway when he was finally caught by police.

State troopers, with the help of a few good Samaritans, stopped traffic and picked up the escapee: Stitch, a giant sulcata tortoise with a sand-colored shell.

The 14-year-old tortoise had broken out of his enclosure and a few layers of fences at the nearby Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Ranch, a roadside animal park open to the public, before making a run for it. Danna Cogburn, an owner of the ranch, said he had been missing for two to three hours before officers told the owners they had found him on the road.

“How in the world or where he got out?” Ms. Cogburn said. “I’m not really sure.” She said Stitch was one of only two tortoises on the ranch who were small enough to have made it through the fence. “He had to work at it and be very determined.”

The night before his July 30 escape, Ms. Cogburn said, storms had damaged some of the ranch’s gates and enclosures, including the area where the tortoises are kept.