It’s no secret when our ditch is wet I’m scared to death of snakes. I’ve seen them in there before and I’m sure that they’re just waiting to come out an slither around my legs. Yuck!
So when Daryl said to come look at what he saw in the ditch tonight and he had a big smile on his face, I seriously thought it was a cute little bunny family or maybe baby kitties? OK, the kitties was a stretch, but honestly I thought it was going to be furry and sweet.
Guess what it was? It was a TURTLE! Seriously why do we have a big turtle in our ditch? And why does he look like he’s kind of dead?
OK, so it’s a turtle and I guess he can be cute. Not fluffy cute – but still cute. And the more that I looked at him the cuter he got. It would be kind of fun to have a turtle around the farm. I wasn’t sure what to feed him, but I’d figure it out. Well that was my thoughts until I tried to move him.
I reached under the mud to pick up his backside and just like a bolt of lightening he pulled his neck out of his shell, cocked his head backwards, and tried to BITE me! I’m not a Rocket Scientist but even I knew that this wasn’t going to be a good pet to have because it was a snapping turtle. But really how mean could he be? So back into the mud I go with my hands to try to see if I can pick him up and this time I literally jumped backwards and caught myself before I landed in the ditch. It scared the living daylights out of me. He wasn’t cute at all and all he wanted to do was to bite me.
I needed a plan. So off I went to get a rake to help me get him out of the ditch. I thought that maybe he’d grab on to the rake and then I could carry him out of the ditch while his mouth was grabbing onto the rake. Well the rake was a good idea and he did bite onto it, but he was taking chunks of wood off the handle when he was biting it. He kind of spit the wood out, crank his head around, and then he’d look at me. For some reason I was getting the feeling that he didn’t like me at all. And the truth to be told, I wasn’t starting to like him too much either!
Well this wasn’t working so well at all. My next attempt was to get an old towel and to cover his eyes up so he couldn’t see me. Let’s just say that this didn’t work so well either. He bit the towel and pulled it off his head and then you guessed it, within a second he would reach up and try to see if he can snap a chunk of meat out of my arm. Aren’t turtles supposed to be slow? This guy might have looked dead when we first found him, but I’m just saying it was totally an act.
I decided that maybe we didn’t really want to save this turtle after all. I mean there must be a lot of them in the world right? And if he did travel from the small creek that was at least a half mile from our farm, he must have been pretty tough if he walked that far in the ditch.
But I was worried that the dogs would come and mess with the turtle and by the looks of it I knew that the turtle would win. It was a good thing the turtle had just about enough of this ditch (and probably me too) and off to the West he headed, back to he the small creek.
So as I watched him make his way down the ditch, I was thinking to myself if I disliked snakes or snapping turtles more. For awhile tonight it was a close competition, but my money is still on the slimy snakes!
This was SOOO Funny!! Years ago I read a book about Emily Post, the etiquette queen, and her story about the snapping turtles that got out of the packing container and took up life in her basement was just full of wooden shovel handles snapped to bits, red meat held out on a rake to tempt a turtle out from the shadows- all efforts to turn the turtles into turtle soup. Even funnier was that fact that a young male admirer had stopped by to share a book of poems with her, and at the same time her husband, two sons, and the cook and servants were all trying to catch at least one turtle for dinner, shouting and calling and yelling in the background ensued.