A Very Lucky Snapping Turtle

Someone at work asked me if I ate snapping turtles last week.  I said, "sure."  He told me there was a big one in the ditch right outside the shop.  It has been raining non-stop for two weeks now, so all the ditches are flooded with water.  I walked outside and grabbed a big stick and walked to the ditch.  There was the old snapping turtle on the bottom of the ditch.  The clear rainwater made the snapper easy to see.

I used the stick to pry him off the bottom and slid him up and out of the water.  He was pretty mad and started snapping at the stick with his 'beak-like' mouth.  I was careful to keep my distance as old-timers say that if they bite you, they don't let go until it thunders or lightning strikes.  I wasn't going to test out that theory.

I remembered back when I was farming, I had lots of experience in catching snapping turtles.  Prior to planting rice we would water level all the rice fields.  The best way to describe this practice is to say that it involves dragging a big blade behind a big tractor in a flooded field.  The blade pulls the mud up and rolls it over, turning the mud into a slurry that is pulled round and round in the field.  You do your best to pull the high spots into the low.  Gravity levels the mud so that the portion of field you are in is level and would accept a flood with no high spots.  Kind of hard to explain.

Anyway, this would inevitably unearth big turtles.  You could see them swimming in the water and we would get out of the tractor, wade through the water and grab the turtles by the tail.  I'd bring them into the cab of the tractor and put them on the floor.  Man, would they stink!  Turtles have the ability to emit and nasty smell.  At the end of the day, we'd put them in the back of the truck and bring them to a cousin's house.  You could hear the turtles rustling underneath a bunch of Dr. Pepper cans.  We'd put them in an old freezer in the yard where they would wait until we had gathered enough turtles to eat.  A big turtle sauce piquante (turtle meat cooked in a spicy red gravy) would be cooked and we'd eat it for lunch.  Delicious!  It has been a while since I've eaten turtle sauce piquant.

I was thinking about bringing him home and cooking him, but this is no country turtle.  We work right near a bunch of big chemical plants and that is where this turtle was found.  These turtles can live to be 100 years old.  I have no idea what type of toxins are in his meat and didn't want to take the chance in eating him.  Besides, he's really stink up my car if I tried to take him home.  So, I used the stick to push the old fella back in the ditch instead of taking him home to eat.  He's a lucky turtle!