My boots were full of sea water. Obviously I’d chosen the wrong footwear for the hike down from my modest jeep to the soft white sand of the shoreline. I was there on precious work though and no amount of warm water in my boots, water full of darting little silver fish, would deter me from carrying it out.
I was there to find the reclusive indigenous Long-Breasted Beaver Turtle, named after the lengthy nature of its bosom and its predilection for collecting wood (for which no convincing scientific hypothesis can account, though I have my own ideas).
I was glad to rid myself of those waterlogged boots and unsheathe myself of my overalls and slip into my swimming gear, which included goggles, oxygen tank and harpoon gun, for self-defence or to capture live specimens.
As on most of my expeditions and experiments I have no team behind me. I prefer to go it alone, man pitched precariously against nature in a battle of strength, courage and wits. I dove like a bullet into the shallows, parting the waters with my hands and was immersed in that silky, warm exotic sea, full of life and colours.
The colours of the reef struck me immediately, bright oranges like the surface-rock of Mars, pinks like the skin of flying elephants, deep greens like condensed forests of Christmas trees. The bright naked sun burned shapes through the surface of the water and made everything under the surface ripple with wet light and look like the skin of a fish.
After my initial adoration’s, which I was well accustomed to experiencing and even accounted for in my tight schedule, I made my way out to sea further, where the reef ended and the water went suddenly deeper and darker.
Here there were strange, moon-like rocks that grew like towers out of the dark depths. They just skimmed the surface of the water and like hidden predators lay ready to pounce on anything that came too close. This had recently been the fate of a tourist yacht and the vessel lay still tangled up in those deadly spires, sailcloth ripped and tatters and splintered wood in every direction.
The hull lay somewhere deeper; the biggest treasure trove of fine wood, and it was here where I felt sure I would find the species of turtle.
I headed down into the bluish darkness and felt the water get cooler, and left behind the rapid life that shot around in every direction in the shallower depths. Here only lowly plankton were illuminated in my headlamp.
I found the remains of the hull lodged in between where three of the rugged rock towers met, as if it were a tiger hiding in the boughs of a jungle tree.
I turned off the headlamp and set my visor to night vision, so as not to upset the famously light-sensitive turtles.
I swam as gently as I could into the hull, everything the same shade of light turquoise to my eyes, my black wetsuit helping me slink in like an oil spill into the water.
At what first I thought was a bit of timber came floating down and obscured my vision, before I looked and saw – it was the decayed remains of one of the tourists. His head was gone though the camera which would have hung around it remained, having snagged on a shirt button, and floated out in front of the missing head, waiting for a picture that would never be taken.
Sharks! I thought, and for the first time I felt some fear at to what may happen to me alone in this underwater dungeon of broken boat. I pulled the harpoon gun around my front and readied my finger on the trigger.
But it was then, when I was frightened of seeing the diver’s mortal enemy, when I saw what I had been searching for: a beautiful specimen – a female Long-breasted Beaver Turtle was moving towards the cracked ceiling of the hull. She was dragging a lovely long wooden staff upwards towards a hole in the ceiling, obviously about to exit the hull with her prize. (And now I shall take this chance to espouse my own theorem as to why this species gathers wood – I believe they collect it to build underwater nests, much in the same manner as birds. In these nests they take refuge from the world above water, and also I hypothesise it is where they lay their eggs and nurture their young).
I had a moment to take in the beauty and majesty of this strange beast – its underbelly spotted with blue stains, its strangely elongated and curved beak, and its long, long bosom.
No sooner had I admired all of this and was preparing to take out my tranquiliser dart, when out through the crack in the ceiling came flying a miraculous Silver Tongue Shark. The shark saw me immediately and our eyes met for an instant, and I felt the horrible blackness and emptiness in those eyes, and he darted like a bolt of lightning at my turtle.
It was too quick, and by the time I had fired my trusty harpoon into the neck of this devilish beast, the shark had already seized the turtle in its lamp-like jaws and the turtle’s purple blood was clouding up the rushing water.
Once the harpoon had struck the shark let go and retreated, moving clumsily, painfully back through the little hole, and was gone.
I took the turtle, a famously shy species but too shocked and wounded to move from me, under my arm and swam like a whale in full mating flight back to the shoreline, not looking back for fear of meeting those two empty eyes again, coming like a knife out of the darkness.
I reached the reef again unscathed, though my female companion was mortally wounded and had lost much blood. She died on the white sand, moments after I had struggled with her out of the water and laid her down to revive her with a concoction of medicines from my belt.
It was too late – she was gone. I had failed to save the animal, though I felt now surer of my hypothesis concerning the species, and had now seen that sharks posed a real threat to them even more than the destruction of their habitat.
The preserved body of the turtle hangs in my library, along with all the other breasted animals, and is surely the one and last example I’ll ever set my eyes upon, God save them.
thewordgun 