“Dad, let’s catch a turtle and cook it.”
How well I remember those words. My 13-year old son, Jimmie, had approached me one day suggesting a turtle hunt followed by a turtle skinning and turtle cooking. It would be one of those days I would like to forget.
Before braces, before three sets of college tuitions and two major weddings, my wife and I owned a neat little cottage on a private lake in Greene County. The lake had a good population of bass and bream and some of the biggest snapping turtles I have ever encountered. It was in this lake that my son suggested we procure the turtle for our stewing pot.
Normally, common sense would have prevailed, but this was back before I had any common sense, and my son somehow talked me into this questionable undertaking. Actually, I was ripe for the opening because I had just bought a Smith & Wesson snub nose .38 revolver that I was eager to try out. A friend of mine, an insurance adjustor, said he had some reclaimed weapons they would auction off by sealed bids.
“Put in a bid, Jim. You might get lucky.”
So I did, but I didn’t – get lucky, that is. I did, however, become the owner of a snub nose pistol, whatever that’s worth. The definition of a snub nose pistol, for those who do not belong to the NRA, is that it has a very short barrel and is incapable of hitting a target of any description. This would become something of a problem for a snapping turtle hunter facing his foe, but I’m getting ahead of the story.
That afternoon, I showed my impressed teenager my new weapon and confided in him that this fine Smith & Wesson piece would be the undoing of any turtle we happened to catch. That evening, Jimmie and I launched our jon boat and set out five turtle traps, each of which consisted of a stainless steel hook secured by a cord to an empty one-gallon milk jug and baited with a chunk of stew beef.
Early the next morning while I was dreaming about fly-fishing in Montana Jimmie aroused me with, “Dad! Wake up. Let’s go check our turtle traps.”
Two cups of coffee later, we were on the lake, trying to track down our traps. The baits were gone on three of the traps and the hook was bit in two on the fourth, which should have been a clear sign for me to go back home and forget about turtle hunting. But then we caught sight of the last gallon jug, dancing up and down in a small cove.
Together, we pulled in the cord, which was attached to the biggest, nastiest, most ferocious looking thing I have ever seen – with the exception of a blind date I once had at Sweet Briar.
I was thinking that a small, tactical nuclear warhead might be a better choice of weapons than my little snub nosed pistol, and I wasn’t about to put that nasty thing in the boat with us. So we drug it along behind the boat. It was easily the ugliest water skier in North America.
When we beached at the boat dock, I pulled the angry turtle up on the bank and drew my .38 from the holster. The turtle then began a slow, steady charge, heading directly for the toes protruding from my flip-flops, when I fired the first shot.
A huge clump of grass and dirt soared into the air about six feet from the approaching and clearly enraged turtle, and the turtle kept coming. I aimed and fired again, this time missing the turtle by eight feet in the opposite direction. A third shot went behind the turtle and the fourth was far to the front. By now, the turtle had me nearly pinned to the dock and was making his final move for my toes. Right before he would chomp down on one of my favorite little piggies, I put the gun to his head and blew him away.
“Nice shot, Dad!” said my delighted son. “Now what do we do?”
“I guess we’ll skin him,” I said as color began returning to my cheeks and my toes stopped cowering in fear. Never hunt turtles with flip flops on, by the way.”
Skinning a turtle with an ordinary knife is like peeling concrete off the sidewalk with a pair of tweezers. Holy Jumping Geronimo, they are tough scoundrels. And stink? Merciful heavens! I would rather eat a sewer meringue pie than clean another turtle. After three or four hours, I finally disengaged the turtle from his shell, rinsed away whatever gook he had been eating and put him in a big pot. I cooked the turtle about five hours before pouring out a bowl of turtle soup with assorted chunks of meat. The soup was okay, if you like pond moss broth, but the meat was so tough you couldn’t even chew it. It would be my first and last attempt at hunting, skinning and cooking turtles.
As for the Smith & Wesson snub nose pistol? I traded it the next week. I suppose if I practiced long enough, I might have eventually been able to hit something with it, but I didn’t think Winchester could manufacture that many bullets.