Finding Wonder in the Retrieval of a Turtle

 

I take the dogs down to the water two or three times a week, sometimes everyday when it’s hot, to swim. 

They like it, and I like watching them, particularly when the two older ones, a lab and a mutt, dunk the pup, a German shepherd now six months old. It’s my way of giving them a bath, something Pam insists on for no apparent reason, and judge them done and the water romp over by the length of their tongues hanging out. When their tongues are dragging, I marshal the troops for the walk back through the woods up to the house where I get to watch them shake all over the grandkids causing them to squeal and jump around like popcorn in a popper.

It doesn’t take much to entertain an old person’s brain. I hardly ever watch T.V.

I feel certain that over the years I have owned upwards of a hundred dogs, most of them hunters of one sort or another, but I am an equal opportunity employer: If you can do something besides licking a hand or jumping up into a lap, you can live out here. You think I’m exaggerating, but then you have not been out here when the litters of nine or ten are tangling in my feet while feeding them out in the yard. A hundred might be the low number.

If they could talk, they’d all whisper huskily the same thing in your ear: “I roll in dead things.” Because life includes death, there are an infinite number of dead things in the woods between my house and the water. If, by chance, because I am always on the alert for things dead in our daily walks, they find something dead and roll in it before I can direct their attention towards another, more pleasant, venue, (I carry a big stick, sometimes a slingshot, for this) then we have to march back down to the lake and begin the bath all over again.

All those dogs shared another common trait: I never saw a one of them that did not like the taste and smell of a box turtle. When I say “taste,” I don’t mean eat them. They can’t, their shells being so hard, but they love to pick them up and loll them around in their mouths, and they will do it for hours, for whatever reason. Don’t ask me why. Nobody knows why they like to roll in dead things, either.

There was that kid in the second grade, Miss Wright’s class, sitting next to me that liked to eat boogers, nobody knows why, and we talked it over plenty at recess. It kept me from learning math properly. I often wonder if he still does that. If he’s still around, he’d be about 63 years old by now, or maybe 89. I still can’t do math for thinking about his snack-break habit.

In any case, my grandson, Lane, was out at my place the other day, and wanted to go with the dogs and me down to the lake, so we took off, each with our own large stick to carry. We hadn’t covered 50 yards before the dogs balled up at the base of a 200-year-old Post Oak and started to fuss at and worry something hidden in the tall poison ivy growing around the base of the tree. Why I didn’t think “turtle” immediately, I don’t know. Probably because I had not seen a turtle since last October and did not have turtles on my mind.

But turtle it was and Spike The Wonder Dog came up with it after a tussling moment, holding it gently and proudly in his mouth as he “retrieved” it up to me. The turtle obviously was not enjoying the experience, as he had barricaded himself so tightly into its shell that nothing short of a SWAT team and flash-bangs would get him to come out. We could see neither head nor feet, so tightly ensconced was he.

“Papa! It’s a turtle! Can I hold it!?”

“Sure.”

Old habits are hard to break. Without even wanting to, I began to “teach” Lane about the turtle as we handed it back and forth between us, pointing to the different features we could see, and awaiting further developments in the meantime.

There are 16 different species of turtle in Oklahoma of which the Three-Toed Box Turtle (Terrapene Carolina) is one of the more common, and the one you are most likely to run over on the highway if you are inattentive, or just plain mean. Young ones are primarily carnivorous, eating bugs, worms, and grubs, while the older ones are omnivorous, tending towards vegetarian.

They go into hibernation in the fall by burrowing up in leaf duff or loose topsoil where they await, sleeping, the arrival of the following early May whereupon they take to the highways, literally, traveling across country looking for the mate that left their scent trail for them on the ground. For the most part, outside of the brief breeding season which ends by July, they are not wide travelers, and tend to show up year to year in the same place as the year before for those who pay attention to such things, and can live from 75 to 100 years, which not many will notice that. “Hey! That’s that turtle I saw a hundred years ago right here in the same spot!”

Taken as a whole, top and bottom, their shell is called a carapace. The top half of the carapace is covered with rectangular-shaped “scales,” more properly called scutes. The bottom shell is called a plastron. Not all turtles can close up their carapace like the one Lane and I held. Soft Shell Turtles (Tryonyx spiniferus), good to eat, and often reaching huge size (I spotted one in Keystone one time a good twenty inches across) cannot. But, then, most turtles cannot run fast like the Soft Shell can, either.

The common box turtle’s aforementioned three toes are on its back feet, not the front. Males have red to orange eyes, quite striking, like a male wood duck’s eyes, while the females have yellow to brown eyes. Females lay eggs they cover with loose dirt and which then hatch out in late summer or early fall, not being tended by either parent. Unlike snakes, turtles can both see and hear extremely well.

“Is it a boy or a girl, Papa?” Lane wanted to know. I have never seen a kid not try to make this inadvertent gender connection between themselves and an animal, no matter the sort. It almost seems genetically programmed and is their way, I suppose, of better understanding a creature that is quite literally “out of their world.” The creature being a girl or boy, whichever applies, somehow makes the mystery of the creature more contemporary, I think. Since a boy or a girl understands other boys and other girls, then they understand turtles. Does that make sense? I think that’s the way it works.

“It’s a boy.” I said, looking into the smallest part of its face which was just now beginning to come out, ever so cautiously, from behind the plastron barricade.

“How can you tell, Papa?”

“Because its eyes are red.”

“Yeah!” Lane said after a pause to stare into the turtle’s face, “I see ‘em! Can we keep him?”

“Well, let me ask you something. Would you like it if I kept you in a box all summer, never let you out, and only threw in a piece of lettuce every now and then for you to eat? No McDonald’s? No Taco Bell?”

He didn’t want to do that. He’s a smart kid, and fair minded, and his “No” was both quick and assertive. What we would do would be to box the turtle long enough for his momma and Sissy to see, and then take fingernail polish and mark one of the scutes as his mother, at the same age, used to do to see if they would come back to the same place the following year. Some of them, by the way, did; one for more than 20 years.

Boxed, we left the turtle in the pantry in the kitchen, picked up our big sticks and started out again with the dogs for the lake. By rock tossed over the bluff in front of the house, the lake is only about 40 yards away. By path down through the woods, it’s about 200. Halfway there, Lane had a question.

“When will we see that turtle again, Papa?”

“‘Bout a hundred years, maybe.” I had my head up, nose to the wind, looking and smelling for dead things as the dogs ranged ahead of us, doing the same thing, the cotton pickers.

“Man! Will that be by the end of summer?”

Which was a hard question for me to answer. Summer lasts a long, long time in this country. Sometimes, by the end of August, it seems as if it has been going on about a hundred years.

“Probably,” I said. “‘Bout the time dove season starts.”

Which, to me, might as well be a hundred years away.

© 2008 Conrad M. Vollertsen