The other day I was driving along one of those little two-lane black-tops that snake through the Ozarks.  I take these routes whenever I have a choice.  There’s a lot less traffic, a lot more scenery and you sometimes see things that you’d miss on the bigger roads.  Like last week when I crested a hill and what I saw coming at me near the center-line in the other lane, was a snapping turtle. 

Not driving a car, of course, this was a snapping turtle so young he couldn’t have gotten a license even if he could have reached the pedals. He was a long way from any body of water that I could see, and he was dragging himself along laboriously as if he’d gone a long way and had a long way yet to go.  Snapping turtles being so popular as they are, I wondered how much longer he would make it before someone ran him over.

To be perfectly honest with you, for a fraction of a second, I considered letting my wheels drift over to do away with him myself.  I didn’t though, because killing things, even something as apparently void of any redeeming grace as an alligator snapping turtle, bums me out. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no animal-rights advocate or anything.  I wear leather shoes, often eat meat and rarely leave home without a few ostrich plumes in my hair.  I support all these things because they provide employment for a bunch of animals that would otherwise be homeless and starving.  

Before you start typing your hate mail, let me point out that this cold and bitter world is full of people who are even worse than me, if you can feature that.  Worse, at least, when it comes to snapping turtles, snakes, spiders and other things you’d as soon not find between the sheets of your bed.

I once knew a woman who took in stray animals.  Her house looked (and smelled) like a veterinary clinic because of all the wounded creatures she was nursing back to health.  This same gentle soul, however, would risk life and limb swerving across the highway to wipe out a snapping turtle if she saw one in the road.

She said she couldn’t think of any useful purpose that the alligator snapper serves on this earth, but frankly I think that if snapping turtles were cute and furry instead of hideous and slimy, she’d have felt differently.  I’ll bet there are all sorts of useful and important contributions that snapping turtles make BESIDES swallowing up yellow fuzzy baby duckies, but who cares when they look so monstrous?

Well, the truth is, that our cold-blooded friends just don’t get no respect.    Just because you’ve got jaws like a steel bear trap, or long fangs that inject deadly venom, no body wants to cuddle with you.

Homo sapiens is such a shallow species.

That reminds me of a story my father used to tell. 

This story was about my father’s pal, Fred.  Among many other failings, Fred was terrified of snakes, but, like a lot of people, he didn’t really have the good judgment to just stay away from them.   Instead, like a lot of people, Fred hated things that he was afraid of, and saw it as his job to see that anything he was afraid of didn’t live very long.

On the occasion of this story, my father and Fred had been doing some work in our upper meadow and were headed back to the house for lunch.  It was one of those wonderful, early-spring days when life is at it’s finest; when every living creature wants to be out enjoying it, even those that normally prefer the cool dampness under a large rock or an old piece of barn roofing.

The birds were singing, the squirrels were frolicking, God was in his heaven and my father and Fred were driving the truck through the Old Mahan Field when suddenly, Fred’s plump and normally quite pliable body went rigid.

“Stop the truck!” he demanded in a tense, angry voice. 

My father stopped.  Fred got out and cautiously walked back a few yards to where an enormous copperhead was coiled in the ditch sunning himself. 

This thing was a real monster.  As big around as my wrist and five or six feet long, he lay there completely motionless save for the occasional dart of his forked tongue, or for the slow, nearly imperceptible movement of the narrow slits of his pupils as he kept a vigil for something warm, stupid and small enough to swallow. 

Fred towered above him seething with hate.  He glared down at the snake.

The snake glared back up at Fred.

Without a word, Fred turned and strode seriously back to the truck (or as seriously, at least, as a five-foot-eight, 300-pound man in overalls and no shirt can stride).

Peering into the bed of the truck, he searched for a weapon suitable for dispatching this slithering Satan back to Hell.

What he found was a claw hammer.

As my father watched with detachment from the sidelines, Fred grasped the wooden handle purposefully and came walking slowly back to where the copperhead lay coiled.  He moved slowly, intent on what he was about to do, as he muttered curses and vile epithets under his breath.

(continued)

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