Following the Water Read online

  A turtle leg—or even two or all four—seems so little sustenance for a predator such as a river otter. And it is such a great loss for an animal as long-lived as a turtle. But that is my reckoning, as one partial to turtles. Ever impartial, nature does not calculate on such a scale in seeking to maintain its temporal equilibriums, which are staged against constant challenge. A turtle leg may help an otter continue along to a deeper feeding; a turtle must evade or overcome the consequences of predation.

  Thinking of the adult female who is the most familiar to me of all those I follow or observe here, in that I have seen her more times over more years than any other, I continue upstream. I am well acquainted with her rounds of the year, her seasonal times and places. In my apprehensive approach to a small stretch of the brook that curls around the peninsula of a red maple swamp where she spends her winters, I see her. I find that she has lost her entire right front leg and most of her left hind foot. My documentation becomes excruciating. I realize that these findings are forcing me to become purely a field biologist collecting data; the writing down becomes numbing. She will be ambulatory at least, and perhaps capable of nesting.

  Soon after this I find another male who has lost a leg, and then an older male, one of the colony's dominants, perhaps even an alpha male, who on the turning of a moment has been left with but one small stub where his two broad forelegs, so characteristic of fully mature males, had propelled him through decades.

  I hesitate before walking on ... can I go on witnessing, recording this unprecedented predation? I remind myself that what I have encountered is not the result of some human-driven assault. In this essentially natural arena I am witness to a harsher aspect of life pitted against life, in the form of two very different species arrived at by widely divergent evolutionary pathways. Those paths of biological destiny have brought otter and wood turtle to this brook at this moment in the streaming of time and to a clash of fates set in the coevolutionary process. The otter survives through rapacious predation, the turtle by avoiding or surviving it.

  Reality presses hard upon the dream of the new season. I try to accommodate both and stay with the day and all that unfolds within it. My turning all but completely to my field ecologist aspect is in no small measure an act of self-preservation, a way to suppress my boyhood turtle seeking, swamp-and-stream-wandering-in-forgetfulness, which was what brought me to my original connection and dominated my early decades and which has never left me nor been driven out of me.

  It becomes clear that I am seeing the results of an unusual predatory episode. I have to think that there were more fatalities than the one I witnessed, and it occurs to me that dead turtles may well have been swept along by the floods and perhaps ended up in the assemblages of debris left throughout the brook-side lowlands. I begin to search, and almost at once I see a shell sticking upright from a lengthy barrier that has the appearance of a fence made of wattles wedged up against a row of alders. Far from what I came here to look for today, this is a necessary finding. I know I have to see this search through and document as completely as possible whatever it reveals.

  It does not always happen that something I have envisioned, for good or ill, so quickly comes to pass. But it occurs often enough that it could seem preternatural: my seeing in advance seems destined. This intuition—or is it merely the entertaining of a hunch?—is more likely a case of the predictable arising from accumulated experience than it is pure chance or anything psychic. It has much to do with cues in the seasonal situation and has its foundation in the natural. My observations have led me to be in full accord with the aphorism that the eye seldom sees what the mind does not anticipate. Sometimes, as in the upright turtle shell before me, the anticipated appears with what seems impossible immediacy. At other times years pass between the envisioning and the seeing. In either case what I have foreseen uncannily appears all but exactly as I expected. And I never stop looking.

  A little more than half of the shell juts perpendicularly from the compacted matrix of flood debris. I look down into it to see that the forelegs are intact, folded and drawn into the shell to block the narrow space between the carapace and the plastron, in the manner of a wood turtle protecting his head. Limbs can be lost, and life goes on, but a bite to the head—the favored modus operandi of a terrestrial predator, the raccoon—is fatal. Perplexed by the perfect condition of the forelegs, and almost without thinking, I take a twig to touch one. The leg flinches—the turtle is alive.

  When I pull her from the debris a story comes together: she has no hind legs. A living turtle, not a lifeless shell, was swept along with and integrated into this snag of branches, vines, leaves, and long strands of grass and sedge, the very stuff of the cover that these turtles are utterly dependent on to pass unseen by predators. In a terrible twist of fate, a large female wood turtle, deprived of the strong legs and gripping feet and claws that would anchor her during the most insistent surges of the brook or allow her to escape from the full force of a spate and secure a holdfast in a quieter edge or backwater, became no more than a piece of driftwood carried along by the flood. She was left entangled in such a way that her intact forefeet could find no leverage, and she had no hind legs with which to extricate herself.

  It is hard to see how she can go on. I set her down, step back, and watch. Her head comes out. She looks about her, regarding the world with which she has an intimacy, a history, and connections I cannot imagine. In time her forelegs extend ... that beautiful, deep orange color. No hind legs will ever appear again from that sculpted shell. Can she pull herself along, get by somehow? She begins to move, and I am startled by the leverage she achieves. I crouch down to observe, and see that the merest stump of her left hind leg is just barely able to touch the ground and provide her with a modicum of thrust. Her progress is not as agonizing as I had pictured.

  I think again of coevolutionary design, of how everything around me here is still being worked on, worked out, as has been the case since life's beginnings on Earth. That opening between the rear edges of the turtle 's carapace and plastron has been shaped to allow her to withdraw her legs and tail. Living bone, the rib cage, has been remarkably modified to shield legs and tail from a range of predatory teeth and claws. And the degrees of dexterity and movement of those teeth and claws have in turn evolved to overcome a vast suite of deterrents and defenses, among them the legendarily protective shell of the turtle. Teeth and claws cannot overcome all defenses all the time, turtle shell is not always invulnerable. This endless play of one capacity or strategy against another goes on and will continue as long as life persists.

  But here I see that the narrow opening guarding legs and tail allows, in the case of a failure of that defense, the least stump of a leg to extend to the ground and provide a degree of locomotion. If arrived at by chance, such an adaptation is, by means of an endless succession of survival tests, ever being engineered in the direction of perfection of form and function. A complexity beyond comprehension is involved in this one matter alone, but I believe I am looking at evidence of the turtle shell shaping predatory mouth and paw, and predatory mouth and paw influencing the design of the shell.

  The turtle is clearly challenged. If she lives on she will mate, but she will never be able to nest again. And if she falls on her back she may not be able to right herself, and so will die the same long, slow death that would have been her fate had I not found her trapped in the flood debris. I see in her situation another face of evolutionary reality: how a remarkable survivability, a complex complement of adaptations that is essential to the species' persistence, can put an individual of that species to the most severe tests. I cannot think of another vertebrate animal that could have survived the days she spent trapped in flood debris. The turtle's capacity for going without food, even water—occasional rain probably kept her going in her all-but-certainly fatal predicament—for protracted periods might well have allowed her to linger for weeks.

  If another predator had found her and tried to extract her hea
d or a leg, it might have pulled her from the snag and then, failing to get anything out of her shell, wandered off, freeing her in turn to hobble on. Such interactions of chance and design, played out over a span of time I cannot grasp, must play a role in the history of life on Earth. It is a history that, as Thoreau observed, we erase without ever having come close to fully reading.

  The days, possibly years, left to her will be framed in struggle. But she can go on, and for whatever time she has left, I resolve to allow her to live it here rather than in some protective captivity. If she can gain this much leverage on the smooth surface of the flood-plastered leaves where I set her, she will be able to move about her territory. As compromised as she is, I am certain she will be able to find plants to eat and slugs, the favorite food of wood turtles.

  It is nearly impossible for me to do so, but I turn back to the stream, where I quickly come upon another turtle, yet one more amputee. An old male has only one small stub to serve as forelegs. I try to think that all of this is a bad dream. I almost persuade myself, as I sometimes do in nightmares, that if I can make myself fall asleep in the dream I will awaken outside of it. But this cannot be a nightmare. It is too prolonged, and the background sounds I hear, the murmuring of the brook, singing of sparrows and chestnut-sided warblers, the alders I grasp, the notes I set down, are all too real. My ever-searching eyes have always wanted to see, so keenly wanted to see, and to see so keenly. Now they do not want to look, do not want to find.

  As I continue in my notebook—for the first time this year moving into shade to write—I hear the rustle of what can only be a wood turtle on the move. I can't make out exactly where the on-and-off rustling comes from. The wind has come up and surges in the pines, as though the day would change its mind about spring. Then I see movements not of the wind's doing in some fallen fern shafts. A young wood turtle appears, leaving his basking place—where I never saw him—probably because pine shadows have overtaken the stream bank in the past half hour and it is cooling down. He is hardly two feet from where I stand, on the other side of an alder mound on which I have set my vest in order to write. He is within a yard of the water's edge. I can see only his left front foot. But when I pick him up I find that he is completely whole, a perfect turtle. For two decades, most of the wood turtles I have recorded have been free of predatory damage. Now that rule has, in the turning of a single season, become the exception.

  Seeing this six-year-old turtle, one I have come upon every year since I documented him as a hatchling, breaks the steady toll the day has taken on me. Unsure of when I will be able to come back to a reality I know I must face up to, I let this be my last turtle of the day. When have I ever walked away from such an April day, let alone the day of the wood turtles' first emergence onto the stream banks?

  "It will never be the same here," I all but say aloud, the thought racing through my mind as I pass through a tangle of raspberry, dense even though leafless and with new canes not yet risen. "Never the same" keeps repeating as I think of the intact, vigorous wood turtles I have seen in this forbidding cover and the adjacent sprawl of sweet fern, blackberry, and deer-tongue grass under a canopy of stag-horn sumac and gray birch. I could hardly point to a single place where I have not seen an intact turtle in past seasons. The images of the dead first turtle of the year and today's wounded ones are gradually supplanted by that of the perfect six-year-old emerging from cover. (I suppress for now the ecological reality that he will have to survive another fourteen years to become a breeding adult.) I expand my thought: "Never the same—in my lifetime." The status of the colony that I have known here—with its abundance of unmarred young as well as adult turtles—cannot be reestablished within that limited time frame. But there is time here; it is part of the habitat.

  I see more clearly than ever the dimensions of time and space that are required for, and have been the history of, such workings: the need for a stream entire, linked with another and connected to a river beyond, and all the spaces in between, a sizable enough fragment of the vast way it was only four centuries ago, when there was one continental landscape, and everything in it was interconnected with everything else. The race of humans who came here and supplanted the first of their kind to migrate here, who were not in essence landscape-takers, began a taking and disconnecting that has become an ever-expanding constant, a ceaseless marginalization and even eradication of ecologies in the ultimately impossible drive to satisfy human exigencies and desires, a drive exacerbated to the point of no return by overpopulation. The species that came to invent wealth created poverty, for its own kind as well as for the natural landscape. In wealth and poverty alike the human species now impoverishes the planet.

  The wood turtles have time that I do not have. The brook trout, alders, otters, water ... this system, an ecosystem, has time. If it can be left as an extended, untrammeled landscape, this colony of wood turtles will regain its former robustness. If the landscape is put into human service—I could say human servitude—and this is the global imperative of the day, the time of all these things will come to an end.

  IN MEMORY ONLY

  THAT BREATH of air just now, breathed back to me from the heated stream bank, the scent of sun on earth rising on the slightest stirring of the air ... the mingled scents of moss and leaves, the brook. I remember and am there again, in that place that no longer exists, as a young boy who no longer exists. April's alchemy creates a memory out of mud and water, sunlight and fallen leaves; spring breathes on these and brings something not just to light but to life. At such unbidden moments, and they are fleeting, fragments of memory become so vivid that they live. I cannot see them, I can only feel them, these unconscious rememberings not just of what I was then but of what was all around me. That light of some deep yesterday, the sunlight on the water, the stream that sparkled by, the frog that looked back at me, and at the same time all the world around. Are these some last earthly existences destined to die with me? How is it they return to me, to take me back? Is there ever a going back to stay? Does all this lie in memory only?

  FOLLOWING THE WATER

  That flowing water! My mind wanders across it.

  That broad water! My mind wanders across it.

  That old age water! That flowing water! My mind

  wanders across it.

  —"Myth of the Mountaintop Way," Navajo poem

  RAIN UPON RAIN at the outset of April, spits of snow, slants of sleet; the season advances with warm rains, then holds in place with snow squalls and cold downpours, drisk, and drizzle. But spring does not turn back. It moves on with Earth's shift to that more favorable inclination toward the sun and increasing increments of light, a planet turning in its circumscribed track in space, its reined revolving within a yearly circling of the star it travels with, constant for a time in the cosmos. Snowmelt from winter's final caches, held in the prolonged cold embrace of hemlock stands and north-facing slopes, joins the runoff of rain. The earth is saturated. Not even the evaporation brought about by April breezes and the heavy uptake by bud-swelling plants can diminish the water. Upland hills that will be leaf-rustlingly dry by the summer solstice are so sodden that they could nearly pass for swamps.

  Water is on the move, not only in the ever-flowing cuts and channels of perennial streams and rivers but in flashing silver runs so ephemeral that they rarely come to life outside of this season of abundant rain. It seems these intermittent streams need to be fed hourly. Their sources will be the first to give out as the last of the melting snow is exhausted and the frequent rains of spring drop off. They will lie as waterless traces, their slender cuts among roots and rocks on the forest floor, lined with fallen leaves, implying the glimmering runs that will not return until autumn rains or something on the order of a hurricane's deluge springs them back to life for a late-season race. Everywhere traveling onward, water seeps through the soil and slides over the impermeable underlying bedrock. At this turning point in the year it appears willful and restless, seeking places in which to pool,
only to escape and flow on, as though possessed of the same zugunruhe, the migratory restlessness that is so strong in animate life at thaw. Here, inland and earthbound, water appears intent upon finding its way back to the ocean, back to the clouds, the sources from which it came.

  I enter the dense emergent thickets of silky dogwood, silky willow, winterberry, and alder, with song sparrows singing and swamp sparrows trilling, and wade to the sun-flooded southern end of the vernal pool to look in on the islandlike masses of wood-frog eggs. In clearest water I see developing tadpoles twitching in the transparent medium from which they will be born. On the verge of hatching, they too pulse with an eagerness to move on, an innate evolutionary impatience arising from the fact that their natal water will not be here forever. One might think, upon looking into the overflowing pool today, that there would never be a time without water here. Yet the drying out always does take place, and in some years it can come with surprising suddenness, dooming the tadpoles who must become frogs before the water is gone.

  Nothing is stagnant in April. Even isolated catchments tremble, as though the water in them is anxious to leap back into the air. The pool's surface vibrates, its quivering tension shimmers with sunlight. Unable to contain its vernal bounty, this broad seasonal pond releases a gently murmuring spill at the lowest point in its rim, an overflow that presses on to lower-lying wetlands. In this shallow slide of water I encounter another stream, a living tide that moves against the flow. An upstream migration of mayfly larvae, a solid insect caravan uniformly five or six individuals wide, twists in a long column along the margins of the spillway. This determined procession has a single intent: to reach the pool that is divined to be at the source of this streamlet, the seasonal pond that will last long enough to allow their metamorphosis into adult mayflies, with wings that will lift them from the water for their brief last lives in the air.