Through the Eyes
of the Turtle
by Daniel
G.
Snethen
The spiny soft-shelled turtle
watched him from
the opposite bank—watched the entomologist, burying a five-gallon bucket into
the sandy northern bank of the Keyapaha River. The green dill-pickle bucket was
buried nearly flush to the ground. However, about an inch of hard emerald
plastic remained sticking out of the landscape. Large sinewy hands carefully
mounded up and smoothed the sandy soil around the edge of the pail, making, if
you will, a sort of makeshift ramp which kept rainwater from flowing in but
allowed for tiny terrestrial travelers to climb up and fall into the
subterranean terrarium.
A large black and white
rancid rat, which had
baked three days in the Dakota sun, its over exaggerated scrotum stretched like
a gas-filled balloon, dangled by its naked tail in the grasp of the gloveless biologist’s
hand. The scientist dropped the rotting rodent into the sarcophagus where it
landed on two inches of moist soil dug from the hole of origin. Two wooden
stakes were laid across the span of the pitfall-trap and then covered with a
square piece of plywood which was then weighted down by the sodden plug of the
recently disturbed prairie.
As the wiry man walked away
from trap number
one, the terrapin heard the man mumble, “I’ll show her a thing or two.”
The American burying beetle
was once widespread
throughout the entire Eastern United States. Because of habitat loss, light
pollution and the extirpation of the passenger pigeon, these nocturnal sextons
nearly succumbed to extinction.
Being the apex insect scavenger,
this beetle
requires a relatively large amount of carrion for its life cycle. These orange
and black beetles will strip a bird or mammal of feathers and fur; coat the denude
skin with bio-static oral and anal secretions; have sex on the carcass and then
excavate the soil beneath it, ultimately burying the carrion. Then they stay
underground with the corpse, which does not rot, because of their careful
preparation. Ultimately the eggs hatch and the young are reared by both the
male and female—an exemplary example of both maternal and paternal care—a trait
rarely witnessed with invertebrates.
This remote savannah of
South Dakota was one of
the final strongholds of this once abundant beetle. Here native sod, wild
rivers & streams, as well as denizens not too far removed from prehistoric
time still reign supreme. Here is where the leatherback turtle has floated the
sinuosity of the meandering Keyapaha since time eternal. Here is where we still
find the occasional pronghorn antelope, a throwback to the days when large
marsupial cats hunted the prairie—the natural catalyst for the natural
selection of the North American antelope. Run—run fast—or be devoured.
All of this was programmed
into the instinct of
the floating spiny softshell turtle. He remembered everything from time eternal
or at least so he thought, and nothing he knew, ancestral, primordial or
current could explain to him what the purpose was of the actions of the two-legged
upright thing before him, and so he decided to follow the man along the winding
water course to find out just exactly what his motives were.
Before embarking on his
entomological
expedition, the entomologist’s embittered wife had chewed his head off.
Something about how she felt he was paying more attention to insignificant
necrophagic diners than to his own dear wife. As he left his farmhouse with his
bucket of prepared bait loaded into the back of his ’62 step-side Chevy pickup,
he thought, “What a bitch!”
After completing the first
trapping site the
naturalist proceeded to pothole the riparian habitat in a westerly direction at
approximately ¼ mile intervals. His intention was to saturate 7 miles of prime
habitat and determine the population density of this magnificent creature. This
would take time as there were no real roads running through the sandhills and
spring-fed-meadows he was traveling. Just two-track-trails and sometimes even
these disappeared. And thus, the ancient turtle could easily keep up by simply
floating the river current at its own leisure.
“She just doesn’t
understand me. She doesn’t
understand ecology or anything for that matter. But I’m sure going to show her.
She’s going to get more intimate with nature than she’d ever expect.” Keya (the
turtle) understood what the man was saying but still he did not know just what
exactly he was doing. With focus, the water denizen floated on, following the
man with the buckets and the rats as he slowly progressed in his truck from one
trapping location to another.
Finally, the man stopped
at a site facing a
large butte, commonly referred to by the white man as Turtle Butte. This site,
Turtle Butte that is, represented the eastern most, northern most, natural
stand of Ponderosa Pine. To the indigenous peoples who populated the area for
nearly as long as had the ancestral spiny soft shells, this butte was known as
Keya-paha or in the white man’s vernacular: Turtle Hill.
And then Keya witnessed
a most peculiar thing.
The human being reaching into his bucket exclaimed, “That vixen chewed my head
off this morning and that ain’t going to happen no more. I’m sure going to show
her.” The bloody head swung, back and forth, by its red hair, like a pendulum
before being dropped into the final open casket. The cover board placed, like
a funeral pall,
and the bloody hands of the murderer rolled a cigarette.
And
the turtle? The spiny soft-shelled turtle totally
submerged itself, beneath the ancient river, floated away—contemplating what
had been done.
