Snapping Turtle

As we were brought up on a dairy farm our family all knew what a good day’s work was.  Seven days a week we boys were awakened at six in the morning to begin milking the dairy.  In summer, after milking, the cattle were turned out to pasture and remained there until evening milking at six.

On July fourth, if the weather permitted, my father always began haying.  The first day the mower was used to trim grass around the buildings to make sure it was in good working order for the summer.  The next day we began haying in earnest.  Several acres of hay would be mowed and left to cure and dry for a day or two.  Then it had to be raked into windrows ready for the baler, that is in the time period I’m writing about.  At the time our Allis Chalmers baler baled round bales that weighed nearly 100 pounds each.  These were dropped on the ground and loaded on wagons with manual labor.  Once a wagon was full it was towed to the barn, the bales were sent into a hay mow by elevator, and then each had to be carefully placed in the mow.  On a hot summer day, that loading could be difficult at best, and as the day wore on it got harder, and if anyone thought that was tiring they just hadn’t spent an afternoon in that pressure cooker of a hay mow.  Mowing 100 pound bales under a hot steel roof, for several hours with only short breaks, will surely separate the men from the boys.

Once the haying was done for the day we broke for supper, and then it was time for the evening milking.  Somewhere around 7-7:30 pm we finished for the day.  Then, nearly every evening, we headed for the gravel pit.  Full of ground water, it was like a small lake to us, and nothing is more refreshing than swimming in a gravel pit to a country boy.  On one occasion, when I was about eleven or twelve, my brothers Ron and Dell, as well as myself were indulging in this pastime when we discovered a snapping turtle of a goodly size.  It was around fourteen inches long and maybe ten wide, and had the disposition of a pit bulldog.  As we had driven a farm tractor the mile and a half to the gravel pit, we decided to wrap a chain around the turtle and have it walk home.  The turtle, of course, could not begin to keep up with that tractor so we merely dragged it home through the grass along the side of the road.

Once we got it home we built a leather harness for it and tied it to a stake in the yard with a chain.  For a couple of days all went well until my father discovered this monster in our midst.  He told us this thing was not a pet and that we should get rid of it.  We got the turtle to chomp onto an old broom handle and we chopped its head off with an axe.  We then dug a hole a couple of feet deep and buried both parts of the said turtle.  Turtles, and snakes, have muscles that continue to flex long after their host is dead, and so it was that the next morning that turtle was back on the surface, apparently having continued to move through the night.

For a long time I had nightmares over that turtle coming back to life after having been decapitated.