The other morning I had the hounds out for their walk. It's been turtle season around here. That's when all the turtles have to cross the road, lay their eggs and then walk back across the road.
On this particular morning we saw three snapping turtles. They are quite a magnificent animal. Kind of boggles the mind to think they shared the earth with the dinosaurs.
Boggles the mind even more when you realize they'll still be crawling out of the bogs and the lochs and the sloughs and the marshes every spring even after we nuke the Iranians and they nuke us back.
Lucy, the young pup, was taking a keen interest. She'd nose in, the turtle would lunge, Lucy would get her face out of the way just in time. Then she'd take a few paw swipes at it. Great fun!
Great fun till one of them took a nip out of her paw.
I didn't even notice till we got back to the house and there was blood all over.
Of course, by then the farm manager was in on the act.
Oh my God Lucy's bleeding! We have to take her to the vet!
We do? I'm thinking cut an old bed sheet into bandage-sized strips, wrap her up real good, lock her in the woodshed for a few days, and we're good as gold.
Not good enough for the farm manager.
Soon enough we're at the vet.
Five hundred dollars later we're on our way home. While there is an exhaustive itemized bill that details how a turtle bite becomes a $510.00 item, the gist of it is that the vet wrapped bandages around her foot real good.
But at least they weren't fashioned from old bed sheets.
Today we went back to the vet so he could show us how to wrap a bandage around Lucy's foot all on our own.
That fifteen minute lesson was another hundred bucks!
We just spent 600 dollars on a dog we got at the pound for a $39 fee.
Think I'll be calling her off the snapping turtles when she's ready to walk again.
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