Thoreau and the Snapping Turtle

As his boat glided across a flooded meadow, He saw beneath him under lily pads, Brown as dead leaves in mud, a yard-long Snapping turtle staring up through the water At him, its shell as jagged as old bark. He plunged his arm in after it to the shoulder, Stretching and missing, but groping till he caught it By the last ridge of its tail. Then he held on, Hauled it over the gunwale, and flopped it writhing Into the boat. It began gasping for air Through a huge gray mouth, then suddenly Heaved its hunchback upward, slammed the thwart As quick as a spring trap and, thrusting its neck Forward a foot at a lunge, snapped its beaked jaws So violently, he only petted it once, Then flinched away. And all the way to the landing It hissed and struck, thumping the seat Under him hard and loud as a stake-driver. It was so heavy, he had to drag it home, All thirty pounds of it, wrong side up by the tail. His neighbors agreed it walked like an elephant, lilting this way and that, its head held high, A scarf of ragged skin at its throat. It would sag Slowly to rest then, out of its element, Unable to bear its weight in this new world. Each time he turned it over, it tried to recover By catching at the floor with its claws, by straining The arch of its neck, by springing convulsively, Tail coiling snakelike. But finally it slumped On its spiky back like an exhausted dragon. He said he'd seen a cutoff snapper's head That would still bite at anything held near it As if the whole of its life were mechanical, That a heart cut out of one had gone on beating By itself like clockwork till the following morning. And the next week he wrote: It is worth the while To ask ourselves... Is our life innocent Enough? Do we live inhumanely, toward man Or beast, in thought or act? To be successful And serene we must be at one with the universe. The least conscious and needless injury Inflicted on any creature is To its extent a suicide. What peace- Or life-can a murderer have?... White maple keys Have begun to fall and float downstream like wings. There are myriads of shad-flies fluttering Over the dark still water under the hill.