Fables, Dreams, and Reality...That's Life

Dawn broke hungry in the Tennessee flatlands in 1935, food was hard to come by and the rule was, "if it moves, eat it." The dinner-plate sized snapping turtle arced from the levee wall, out of its yellow-muddy-water security and onto the short-grass bank. Its long penis neck didn't get his parrot beak to the doom-delivering dirty fingers grabbing him. Before the dripping dark shell quit rolling, a bare brown foot stomped it to the clay, and just as quickly, the shiny point of the hay hook snaked into the shell's recess and jerked the resisting head out into the early morning light of reality. The knife blade flashed as the head, or most of it, was keenly cut away at the hay hook and flipped into the backwater of the torpid stream, the clawed feet scratched the dirt in a swimming movement until the turtle hunter tossed it into the kroker sack, with the other two turtles, which were also moving jerkily....