Snapping Turtles

I am not very proud of my role in this story I am about to relate to you. I was quite young at the time and also times were different when I was a youngster.
I was a Huck Finn of sorts. I spent a lot of time on the Leaf River as well as Wing River. Our township drew it's name from the Wing River. The Horseagers lived right by the town hall meeting house. The road to town took a sharp turn and crossed the river here, and logically the bridge was know as Horseager's Bridge.
Mrs Horseager was a widow. She had a nephew my age that would come up from the Twin Cities to stay for the summer. I can't remember his name, but we hung out together on the river. I had a homemade boat that you could push up and down the river with the aid of a duckbill pole. The pole gets it name from the foot on the end of the pole. The foot opens as you push and retracts when you pull back. This allows you to push against mud and the pole will not sink into the mud more than you can pull it back out.
Upstream from the bridge was a wonderful fishing hole for northern pike. On this occasion, we had pushed our way up to fish and were returning when I spotted a very large snapping turtle swimming slowly along the bottom in about six or eight feet of water. I had a spear ready because there often were suckers in this stretch of river and they were very good smoked. My dad could make shoe leather taste good in his smoke house, so I don't know whether it was his recipe or the suckers that made for good eating.
Recently I had heard some old timers talking about snake meat. They agreed that snake meat tastes a lot like turtle. In general, I took it to mean that turtle was good eating. The turtle was swimming with his long neck fully extended. I took careful aim and speared the turtle in the neck. When I got the turtle to the side of the boat, he was huge and his head and mouth were very scary. My friend pushed the boat to shore and we drug the turtle up to the wood pile. Here it gets rather gory. We just wanted to dispatch this turtle so we could eat it. It was not easy. It did everything it could to keep it's neck pulled back into it's own shell. We kept trying to do the opposite so we could make a clean chop with the axe. We took much longer to complete this than I want to admit.
Once we succeeded, we left the turtle to succumb as a chicken always does. The turtle did not cavort around like a chicken. It just started crawling toward the river. This was so unnerving. We would pick it up and put it back on the grass, and again it would start crawling toward the river. Our patience ran out and we drove a nail through one of it's feet and hung it on the side of the woodshed. We left it and returned to the river. As evening descended, we parked the boat and checked on the turtle. To our amazement, it was still struggling. We agreed that we would leave it over night and clean it to eat in the morning.
In the morning, it appeared that life had left the turtle, but as soon as we started to handle it, it again started moving. We were very perplexed. The short version of a very long story is that eventually we gave up trying to clean this turtle. We dug a big hole and buried it.
What I marvel at is why we did not recruit someone to help us deal with this. As we began the whole ordeal, we had good intentions. But for goodness sakes, why we ended up wasting it, and dishonoring it's life, troubles me to this day. To come clean with the whole story would have been to tell that we got a second, but slightly smaller turtle later. I cannot remember if it was the same day or not. It sticks in my mind that they were nineteen and seventeen pounds.
I am intrigued by snapping turtles. They are virtually unchanged since prehistoric times. They catch their food by forcing their mouth open to a point that it locks open. Their tongue has an appendage that looks just like a worm. When a fish tries to feast on the worm, the turtles mouth snaps violently shut. The fish has no chance.
I doubt this story makes a lot of sense. The whole thing is hard for me. I just thought I would try to relate it to you for what it is worth.
Kayak Bandit