The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles
kicker
by EDMUND WILSON
1
IN THE days when I lived in Hecate County, I had an uncomfortable neighbor, a man named Asa M. Stryker. He had at one time, he told me, taught chemistry in some sooty-sounding college in Pennsylvania, but he now lived on a little money which he had been “lucky enough to inherit.” I had the feeling about him that somewhere in the background was defeat, or frustration, or disgrace. He was a bachelor and kept house with two servants — a cook and a man around the place. I never knew anyone to visit him, though he would occasionally go away for short periods — when, he would tell me, he was visiting his relatives.
Mr. Stryker had a small pond on his place, and from the very first time I met him, his chief topic of conversation was the wild ducks that used to come to this pond. In his insensitive-sounding way he admired them, minutely observing their markings, and he cherished and protected them like pets. Several pairs, in fact, which he fed all the year round, settled permanently on the pond. He would call my attention in his hard accent to the richness of their chestnut browns, the ruddiness of their backs or breasts, their sharp contrasts of light with dark, and their white neck-rings and purple wing-bars like the decorative liveries and insignia of some exalted order, the cupreous greens and blues that gave them the look of being expensively dressed.
Mr. Stryker was particularly struck by the idea that there was something princely about them — something which, as he used to say, Frick or Charlie Schwab couldn’t buy; and he would point out to me their majesty as they swam, cocking their heads with such dignity and nonchalantly wagging their tails. He was much troubled by the depredations of snapping turtles, which made terrible ravages on the ducklings. He would sit on his porch, he said, and see the little ducks disappear, as the turtles grabbed their feet and dragged them under, and feel sore at his helplessness to prevent it.
As he lost brood after brood in this way, the subject came, in fact, to obsess him. He had apparently hoped that his pond might become a sort of paradise for ducks, in which they could breed without danger: he never shot them even in season and did not approve of their being shot at all. But sometimes not one survived the age when it was little enough to fall victim to the turtles.
These turtles he fought in a curious fashion. He would stand on the bank with a rifle and pot them when they stuck up their heads, sometimes Hitting a duck by mistake. Only the ducks that were thus killed accidentally did he think it right to eat. One night when he had invited me to dine with him on one of them, I asked him why he did not protect the ducklings by shutting them up in a wire pen and providing them with a small pool to swim in. He told me that he had already decided to try this, and the next time I saw him he reported that the ducklings were doing finely.
Yet the pen, as it turned out later, did not permanently solve the problem, for the wild ducks, when they got old enough, flew out of it, and they were still young enough to be caught by the turtles. Mr. Stryker could not, as he said, keep them captive all their lives. The thing was rather, he finally concluded, to try to get rid of the turtles, against which he was coming, I noted, to display a slightly morbid animosity, and, after a good deal of serious thought, he fixed upon an heroic method.
He had just come into a new inheritance, which, he told me, made him pretty well-off; and he decided to drain the pond. The operation took the whole of one summer: it horribly disfigured his place, and it afflicted the neighborhood with the stench of the slime that was now exposed. My own place adjoined Stryker’s, and in the heavy days of August, when the draining had become complete, my house became uninhabitable and I was obliged to go away for weeks.
Stryker, however, stayed and personally attended to the turtles, cutting off their heads himself; and he had men posted day and night at the places where they went to lay their eggs. At last someone on less friendly terms with him than I complained to the Board of Health, and they made him fill up his pond. He was indignant with the town authorities and declared that he had not yet got all the turtles, some of which were still hiding in the mud; and he and his crew put in a mad last day combing the bottom with giant rakes.
The next spring the turtles reappeared, though at first there were only a few. Stryker came over to see me and told me a harrowing story. He described how he had been sitting on his porch watching “my finest pair of mallards out with their new brood of young ones. They were still just little fluffy balls, but they sailed along with that air they have of knowing that they’re somebody special. From the moment that they can catch a water-bug for themselves, they know that they’re the lords of the pond. And I was just thinking how damn glad I was that no goblins were going to git them any more.
“Well, the phone rang and I went in to answer it, and when I came out again I distinctly had the impression that there were fewer ducks on the pond. So I counted them, and, sure enough, there was one duckling shy!” The next day another had vanished, and he had hired a man to watch the pond. Several turtles were seen, but he had not succeeded in catching them. By the middle of the summer the situation seemed as bad as before.
This time Mr. Stryker decided to do a better job. He came to see me again and startled me by holding forth in a vein that recalled the pulpit. “If God has created the mallard,” he said, “a thing of beauty and grace, how can He allow these dirty filthy mud turtles to prey upon His handiwork and destroy it?”
“He created the mud turtles first,” I said. “The reptiles came before the birds. And they survive with the strength God gave them. There is no instance on record of God’s intervention in the affairs of any animal species lower in the scale than man.”
“But if the Evil triumphs there,” said Stryker, “it may triumph everywhere, and we must fight it with every weapon at our command!”
“That’s the Manichaean heresy,” I replied. “It is an error to assume that the Devil is contending on equal terms with God and that the fate of the world is in doubt.”
“I’m not sure of that sometimes,” said Stryker, and I noticed that his little bright eyes seemed to dim in a curious way as if he were drawing into himself to commune with some private fear. “How do we know that God isn’t getting old? How do we know that some of His lowest creations aren’t beginning to get out of hand and clean up on the higher creations?”
He decided to poison the turtles, and he brushed up, as he told me, on his chemistry. The result, however, was all too devastating. The chemicals he put into the water wiped out not only the turtles but also all the other animals and most of the vegetation in the pond. When his chemical analysis showed that the water was no longer tainted, he put back the ducks again, but they found so little to eat that they presently flew away and ceased to frequent the place. In the meantime, a number of new ones that had come there had died from the poisoned water.
One day, as Asa M. Stryker was walking around his estate, he encountered a female snapping turtle unashamedly crawling in the direction of the pond. She had obviously just been laying her eggs. He had had the whole of his place closed in with a fence of thick-meshed wire which went down a foot into the ground (I had wondered why he didn’t have the pond rather than the whole estate thus enclosed, but he had said that this would have made it impossible for him to look at the ducks from the porch); but turtles must have got in through the gate when it was open, or they must have been in hiding all the time. Stryker was, as the English say, livid, and people became a little afraid of him because they thought he was getting cracked.
2
THAT afternoon he paid a fevered visit to a man named Clarence Millbank, whose place was next to Stryker’s on the other side from mine. Millbank came from Virginia, and he worked in the advertising business. When Asa Stryker arrived, he was consuming a tall Scotch highball, unquestionably not his first ; and he tried to make Stryker have a drink in the hope that it would relieve his tension. But “I don’t use it, thanks,” said Stryker, and he started his theological line about the ducks and the snapping turtles. Clarence Millbank, while he was talking, dropped his eyes for a moment to the wing collar and large satin cravat which his neighbor always wore in the country and which were evidently associated in his mind with some idea, acquired in a provincial past, of the way for a man of means to dress. It seemed to him almost indecent that this desperate moral anxiety should agitate a being like Stryker.
“Well,” he commented in his easy way when he had listened for some minutes, “if the good God can’t run the universe where He’s supposed to be the supreme authority so as to eliminate the forces of Evil, I don’t see how we poor humans in our weakness can expect to do any better with a few acres of Hecate County, where we’re at the mercy of all the rest of creation.”
“It ought to be possible,” said Stryker. “And I say it damn well shall be possible!”
“As I see it,” said Clarence Millbank, — again, and again unsuccessfully, offering Stryker a drink, — “you’re faced with a double problem. On the one hand, you’ve got to get rid of the snappers; and, on the other hand, you’ve got to keep the ducks. So far you haven’t been able to do either. Whatever measures you take, you lose the ducks and you can’t kill the snappers. Now it seems to me, if you’ll pardon my saying so, that you’ve overlooked the real solution—the only and, if you don’t mind my saying so, the obvious way to deal with the matter.”
“I’ve been over the whole ground,” said Stryker, tightening and becoming slightly hostile under pressure of his pent-up passion, “and I doubt whether there’s any method that I haven’t considered with the utmost care.”
“It seems to me,” said Clarence Millbank in his soothing Virginian voice, “that, going about the thing as you have been, you’ve reached a virtual impasse and that you ought to approach the problem from a totally different angle. If you do that, you’ll find it perfectly simple” — Stryker seemed about to protest fiercely, but Millbank continued in a mellow vein of alcoholic explaining: “The trouble is, as I see it, that up to now you’ve been going on the assumption that you ought to preserve the birds at the expense of getting rid of the turtles. Why not go on the opposite assumption: that you ought to work at cultivating the snappers? Shoot the ducks when they come around, and eat them — that is, when the law permits it,” — Mr. Stryker raised a clenched fist and started up in inarticulate anger, — “or if you don’t want to do that, shoo them off. Then feed up the snappers on raw meat. Snappers make right good eating, too. We make soup out of ‘em down in my part of the country.”
Mr. Stryker stood without speaking for such a long moment that Clarence was afraid, he told me afterwards, that his neighbor would fall down in a fit; and he got up and patted him on the shoulder and used all his tact and charm to prevent anything serious happening. “All I can say,” said Stryker, as he was going out the door, “is that I can’t understand your attitude. Right is Right and Wrong is Wrong, and you have to choose between them!”
“I’ve never been much of a moralist,” said Clarence, “ and I dare say my whole point of view is a low and pragmatical one.”
Stryker spent a troubled and restless night — so he afterwards told Clarence Millbank; but he got up very early, as he always did, to hunt for breakfasting turtles, which he baited with pieces of steak. He now scooped them up with a net, and he paused for a moment over the first one he caught before he cut off its head. He scrutinized it with a new curiosity, and its appearance enraged him afresh: he detested its blunt and sullen visage, its thick legs with their outspread claws, and its thick and thornytoothed tail that it could not even pull into its shell as other turtles could. It was not even a genuine turtle: Chelydra serpentina they called it, because it resembled a snake, and it crawled around like a lizard.
As he held the turtle up in his net, in the limpid morning air which was brimming the day like a tide, it looked, with its feet dripping slime, its dull shell like a sunken log, as fetid, stagnant, and dark as the bottom of the pond itself; and he was almost surprised at the gush of blood when he cut away the head. What good purpose, he asked himself in horror, could such a creature serve? Underground, ugly and brutal — with only one idea in its head, or rather one instinct in its nature: to seize and hold down its prey. The turtle had snapped at the hoop of the net, and even now that its head was cut off, its jaws were still holding on.
Stryker pried the head off the net and threw it into the water; another turtle rose to snatch it. Then why not turn the tables on Nature? Why not prey on what preyed on us? Why not exploit the hideous mud turtle, as his friend from the South had suggested? Why not devour him daily as soup? But one would get sick of turtle soup every day. Why not sell it to the public, then? Let the turtle earn money for him! He snickered at what seemed to him a fantasy; but he returned to Clarence Millbank’s that day in a mood of amiability that rather gave Clarence the creeps.
“Nothing easier!” cried Millbank, much amused — his advertising copy irked him, and he enjoyed an opportunity to burlesque it. “ You know, the truth is that a large proportion of the canned turtle soup that’s sold is made out of snapping turtles, but that isn’t the way they advertise it. If you advertise it frankly as snapper, it will look like something brand-new, and all you’ll need is the snob appeal to put it over on the can-opening public. There’s a man canning rattlesnakes in Florida, and it ought to be a lot easier to sell snappers.
“All you’ve got to do up here in the North to persuade people to buy a product is to convince them that there’s some kind of social prestige attached to it — and all you’d have to do with your snappers would be to give the customers the idea that a good ole white-haired darky with a beaming smile used to serve turtle soup to Old Massa. All you need is a little smart advertising and you can have as many people eating snapper as are eating [he named a popular canned salmon], which isn’t even nutritious like snapper is — they make it out of the sweepings from a tire factory. — I tell you what I’ll do,” he said, carried away by eloquence and whiskey, “you organize a turtle farm and I’ll write you some copy free. You can pay me when and if you make money.”
Asa M. Stryker went away, scooped out two of the largest snappers, and that evening tried some snapping-turtle soup, which seemed to him surprisingly savory. Then he looked up the breeding of turtles, about which, in the course of his war with them, he had already come to know a good deal. He had turtles brought in from all around and his duck-pond was presently thick with them. It didn’t cost much at first, though he did have to feed them, as he and his gardener did all the work.
Clarence Millbank helped him launch his campaign and wrote the copy for it, as he had promised. At that time there had already appeared in advertising a new angle on animal food, of which Clarence had been one of the originators. This was the device of representing the animals as gratified and even gleeful at the idea of being eaten.
You saw pictures of manicured and beribboned porkers capering and smirking at the prospect of being put up in glass jars as sausages, and of steers, in white aprons and chefs’ hats, that offered you their own sizzling beefsteaks. Clarence Millbank converted the snapping turtle into a genial and lovable character, who became very familiar to the readers of magazines and the riders on subway trains. He was pictured as always smiling, with a twinkle in his wise old eye, and he had always some pungent saying which smacked of the Southern backwoods, and which Clarence had great fun writing.
As for the plantation angle, that was handled in a novel fashion. By this time the public had been oversold on Old Massa with the white mustaches, so Clarence Millbank invented a listless Southern lady, rather like Mrs. St. Clare in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who had to be revived by turtle soup. “Social historians tell us,” one of the advertisements read, “that more than 70 per cent of the women of the Old South suffered from anemia or phthisis [here there was an asterisk referring to a note, which said “Tuberculosis”]. Turtle soup saved the sweethearts and mothers of a proud and gallant race. The rich juices of the Alabama snapping turtle, fed on a special diet handed down from the time of Jefferson and raised on immaculate turtle farms famous for a century in the Deep South, supply the vital calories that are lacking in the modern lunch or dinner.”
The feminine public were thus led to identify themselves with the lady in the advertisement, who was distinguished by a slim and supercilious chic, and to feel that they could enjoy a rich soup and yet remain slim and superior. The advertisement went on to explain that many women today suffered from anemia and t.b. without knowing it, and that a regular consumption of turtle soup could prevent these diseases from becoming serious.
Deep South Snapper Soup became an immense success; and they presently stimulated the demand by putting on the market three kinds: Deep South Snapper Consommé, Deep South Snapper Tureen (Extra Thick), and Deep South Snapper Medium Thick with Alabama Whole-Flour Noodles.
Stryker employed more helpers and eventually built a small cannery on his place out of sight of the house. The turtles were raised in shallow tanks, where they were easier to catch and control.
3
MR. STRYKER, who had not worked for years at anything but his struggle with the turtles, turned out to be startlingly able as a businessman and industrial organizer. He kept down his working crew, handled his correspondence himself, browbeat a small corps of salesmen, and managed to make a very large profit. He went himself to the city relief bureaus and shrewdly picked out men who seemed capable and willing to work but not too independent or intelligent, and he put over them his gardener as foreman.
He would begin by lending these employees money, and he boarded and fed them on the place — so that they found themselves perpetually in debt to him. As secretary he employed a former teacher, who had lost her job in the high school. A plain woman of middle age, she had suddenly had a baby by an irresponsible character who worked in the local garage. Stryker boarded the mother and agreed to pay board for the baby at a place he selected. As the business began to prosper, this secretary came to handle an immense amount of correspondence and other matters, but he never let her feel she was indispensable.
Mr. Stryker had managed to accomplish all this without ever seeming himself to be particularly preoccupied with the business; yet he had always followed everything done with a keen and remorseless attention that masked itself under an appearance of impassivity. Every break for a market was seized at once; every laxity of his working staff was pounced upon. And his attitude toward the turtles themselves had now changed in a fundamental fashion: he had come to admire their alertness and toughness. When he would take me on a tour of his tanks, he would prod them and make them snap at his stick, and then laugh proudly at their refusal to let go when he would bang them against the concrete.
Clarence Millbank himself, who had invented Snapper Tureen, presently began to believe that he was a victim of Stryker’s sharp dealing. At the time that the business had begun to make money, they had signed an agreement which provided that Clarence should get ten per cent; and he now felt that he ought to have a bigger share — all the more as his easygoing habits had been fatal to his job at his agency. He had been kept on for the brilliant ideas which he had sometimes been able to contribute, but he had lately been drinking more heavily and he had been told that he was about to be fired. He was not the kind of Southerner who stands transplanting well.
Not that Clarence would have made much of a career for himself anywhere. But in the South his dissipation and his reckless behavior would have fallen into place in the landscape. In Hecate County he was always a foreigner. Yet he was much too deeply rural in the feudal Virginian way to enjoy the life of club and office, and he had bought, on the strength of the boom of the twenties, an extensive country place, which he was now finding it hard to keep up. He was also getting lonely and morbid, as a married lady whom he had expected to divorce her husband and marry him had decided that it was too much trouble and that Clarence drank too much. Lately he had been brooding on Stryker, whom he had been finding it rather difficult to see, and had come to the conclusion that the latter was misrepresenting the amount of profit he made.
Finally, one Sunday afternoon, Clarence got suddenly up from a succession of solitary gin fizzes, cut straight through his grounds to the fence which divided his property from Stryker’s, climbed over it with inspired agility, and made a beeline for Stryker’s house, declining to follow the drive and stepping through the flower beds. Stryker came himself to the door with a look that seemed hostile and apprehensive; but when he saw Clarence, he greeted him with a smile and a special cordiality, and ushered him into his study. With his highly developed awareness, he had known that something of the kind was coming.
This study, which Clarence had never seen, as he went rarely to Stryker’s house, was a disorderly and darkish place. It was characteristic of Stryker that his desk should seem littered and neglected, as if he were not really in touch with his affairs; and there was dust on the books in his bookcase, large and unappetizing volumes on zoological and chemical subjects. Though it was daytime, the yellow-brown shades were pulled three-quarters down. On the desk and on the top of the bookcase stood a number of handsome stuffed ducks that Stryker had wished to preserve.
Stryker sat down at his desk and offered Clarence a cigarette. Instead of protesting at once that Clarence’s demands were impossible, as he had done on previous occasions, he listened with amiable patience. “ I’m going to go into the whole question and put things on a different basis as soon as business slackens down in the spring. So I’d rather you’d wait till then, if you don’t mind. It was all we could do to fill orders even before this strike began, and now I can hardly get the work done at all. They beat up two of my men yesterday, and they’re threatening to make a raid on the factory. I’ve had to have the whole place guarded.” (The breeding ponds and the factory, which were half a mile away, were enclosed by a wire fence.)
Clarence had forgotten about the strike, and he realized that he had perhaps come at rather an inopportune time. “I can’t attend to a real reorganization, which is what we’ve got to have at this point, till our labor troubles arc settled and things have slowed up. There ought to be more in this business for both of us,” he concluded, “and I’ll take into account your coöperative attitude when we make our new arrangement in the spring.”
The tension was thus relaxed, and Stryker went on to address Clarence with something like friendly concern. “Why don’t you have yourself a vacation?” he suggested. “I’ve noticed you were looking run-down. Why don’t you go South for the winter? Go to Florida or some place like that. It must be tough for a Southerner like you to spend this nasty part of the year in the North. I’ll advance you the money, if you need it.”
Clarence was half tempted, and he began to talk to Stryker rather freely about the idiocies of the advertising agency and about the two aunts and a sister whom he had to support in the South. But in the course of the conversation, as his eye escaped from Stryker’s gaze, which he felt as too intent between the sympathetic smiles, it lit on some old chemical apparatus, a row of glass test-tubes and jars, which Stryker had presumably carried along from his early career as a teacher; and he remembered — though the conclusion he drew may not have been a just one—the several deaths, at intervals, of Stryker’s well-to-do relatives. His eye moved on to the mounted ducks, with their rich but rather lusterless colors.
Clarence had always been conscious with Stryker of his own superior grace of appearance and manner and speech, and had sometimes felt the other admired it; and now as he looked at Stryker at ease in his turbid room, upended, as it were, behind his desk, with a broad expanse of waistcoat and a rubbery craning neck, regarding him with his small bright eyes set back in the brownish skin beyond a prominent snoutlike formation of which the nostrils were sharply visible — as Clarence confronted Stryker, he felt first an uncanny suspicion, then an overpowering abhorrence, then a freezing fright.
Unhurriedly he got up to go and brushed away Stryker’s regret that — since it was Sunday and the cook’s day out — he was unable to ask him to dinner. But his nonchalance now disguised panic: it was hideously clear to him why Stryker wanted him to take this trip. He wouldn’t take it, of course, but what then? Stryker would try to get him just the same. In his emotion he forgot his hat and did not discover it till they had reached the porch. He returned to the study and on a sudden impulse took down from its rack on the wall the rifle with which Stryker had shot turtles. Clarence came from a part of the country where men quickly take action for themselves, and years of suppressed distaste and pride secretly nourished on liquor were, I suppose, coming to a crisis in this moment. He went out on the porch and shot Stryker.
The cook was out; only the gates were guarded; and Clarence had cut back through the grounds. Nobody heard the shot. The suspicion all fell on the foreman, who had his own long-standing grudges against Stryker and had actually organized the strike. He had had to go into hiding to escape from Stryker’s thugs, and after the murder he disappeared.
Clarence Millbank decided very soon that he would sell his Hecate County place and take a trip to Europe, which he had always wanted to see. But just after he had bought his passage the war with Hitler started, and prevented his getting off—an ironic misadventure, as he said, for a man who had encouraged breeding snapping turtles.
He had dissociated himself from the soup business, and he went to live in Southern California, where, on his pitifully dwindled income, he seems to be drinking himself to death. He lives under the constant apprehension that the fugitive foreman may be found by the police, and that he will then have to confess his own guilt in order to save an innocent man — so that Stryker will get him in the end.