once saw a big snapping
turtle walking across the west field. I went out and picked it up.
Nasty, slimy, stinky thing full of remnants of its many years of
plowing through mud and detritus. I put it into the bed of the pickup
truck and went into the house to see if the book would tell me how to
clean the thing to be suitable for cooking.
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My uncle ran an earth moving company. This was in the fifties, the height
of wet lands draining and levee building along the Mississippi. One of the
operators working for my uncle would keep his eye open for turtle. As the
area drained he would look for the telltale hump. When one appeared he
would maneuver the Cat as near as he could then pick it up with a pole. It
was somewhat comical to watch as he was deathly afraid of snakes and if
there were none around his imagination filled in the blanks. There was a
chain compartment on the Low-Boy trailer that he enlarged to keep the turtle
until time to go home.
He would feed the turtle with corn meal to cleanse it then when time for a
Barbeque the turtle would be a main course. Jack was a heavy drinker,
spending most of the time off the cat in an alcohol induced haze. He and my
father were drinking buddies so we went to his barbeques a lot. I tried the
turtle once and figured the only way to eat one was to get completely wiped
out so you did not have to taste it.