Free Guts by Gary Paulsen Page B

after the snow is gone, you cannot run dogs on sleds, but there are old logging roads everywhere and you can have the dogs pull a light three-wheeled training cart. The dogs are very strong after a whole winter of training and racing and they view this as a kind of lark in which the object is to run as fast as possible down the old logging trails and to “crack the whip” on corners and flip the cart into the ditch or the brush at the side of the road. I swear they laugh when they do this. And the driver’s job is to keep the cart upright while running through the forest on the narrow old trails.
    That spring I ran on some new trails that I hadn’t used before; the snow had gone early and the ice was out. The topsoil up there is unbelievably thin. Though there is thick forest it is like the rain forests in South America; there is heavy growth because there is so much water, not because there is rich soil. On the logging roads the soil is gone and what remains is sand, as pure as any beach sand in the world. After all, in prehistoric times, the area was one large inland sea.
    The sandy roads wind through countless lakes and still ponds in the woods and in each pond there are snapping turtles. Because I had not run these roads in the spring I didn’t know that the female turtles come out to lay their eggs in the sand, and the best open sand they can find is on the logging roads.
    These are big turtles, some of them two or more feet across. And they are ugly, and they are very, very mean. They always make me think of what you would get if you crossed a
T. rex
with an alligator. They hiss and snap and bite and can easily take a finger off. I once had a friend named Walter who got his rear end too close to a snapper on a river-bank and I will always remember the sight of him running past me, naked, screaming, “Get it off! Get it off!” The snapper had locked, and I do mean
locked
, onto the right cheek and would not let go even when we finally stopped Walter and used a stick to try and pry the turtles jaws apart. I suspect he still has a good scar there.
    One day I came barreling over a small hill around a corner thick with brush and the dogs ran directly over a female weighing about forty pounds in the process of laying eggs. Apparently she was not having a good day and we did nothing to improve her disposition. The dogs had never seen a turtle before and heaven only knows what they thought—probably that she was an alien sent down specifically to kill and eat dogs. Everything happened very fast. I saw her just as the dogs ran over her, and she snapped at them left and right, hissing and spitting fur when she connected, and then the cart flipped on its side and the dogs left the trail and tried to climb the trees alongside the road and I rolled over the top of the snapper, screaming some words I thought I had forgotten as she took a silver-dollar-sized chunk out of my jacket, and the cart gouged a hole beneath her and dug up her eggs and we all tumbled to a stop.
    I lay on my stomach, four feet beyond the turtle. The dogs were scattered through the trees, still in harness and tangled so badly that I would have to use a knife to free some of them. For half a beat nothing moved or made a sound.
    Then the turtle looked at the wreckage of her nest, the small round eggs scattered like dirty ping-pong balls; at me flopped there; at the dogs among the trees and the cart lying on its side, and she gave it all up as a bad try and with a final loud hiss, she dragged herself off the sandy trail and back to the swamp where she lived, looking very prehistoric and completely fed up.
    As I began gathering up the pieces, my lead dog, Cookie—who was so smart and quick she never got tangled—reached around and deftly used her teeth to sever the tug holding her to the team (a habit I wished she would stop) and moved down to the turtle nest. She smelled one of the eggs, nuzzled it with her nose, then ate it