Illustration by Lee Kuruganti © 2006

 

 

Extinction

by John Klawitter © 2006

 

 

Harley was an ice turtle, a tortoise, actually, if you want to be precise. At any rate, he was the last remnant of a race left behind after the last great Ice Age. One doesn't think of turtles as adaptable, but as the ice melted and the sun beat down, the same thick shell that had protected him from the freezing snow and polar bear claws now shielded him from the fierce Southern California sun and the snap of the coyote's hungry jaws.

  “Hello, there! What have we here?” a voice said. It was Miss Twilliger, on a Sabbatical from the Biology department and doing contract work for the zoning commission. “Jumping Jiminy, an Ice Turtle!”

  “Please, hold it down,” Harley said, “I'm catching a few rays and a few Zzzz's here.”

  “But you're a rare and almost extinct species!” Miss Twillinger trilled.

  “You couldn't tell it by me,” Harley grumbled, now really annoyed that the newcomer was standing in his little patch of the sun.

  “Well, smarty-pants, when's the last time you saw a mating partner?”

  “What, a girl turtle? It must have been ten years ago.”

  “And? And? And?” Miss Twillinger's voice quivered with excitement, hoping she would forthwith be led to a hitherto unknown colony of rare ice turtles.

  “And nothing,” Harley said. “She was run over by a BMW. Street pizza.”

     “Oh, what a tragedy for all of nature!”

  “Yeah, sometimes life sucks.”

  The coarse tone of his remark set Miss Twillinger back. Vulgarity didn't seem proper at all, coming from a nearly extinct tortoise. He should be grateful he was still around, able to ‘suck oxygen', as they say.. Miss Twillinger was a teacher; she felt she could get down with her students and rap street talk with the best of them.

  “How old are you, anyway?”

  “I'm really old…centuries, maybe even a millennium or two. We ice turtles don't show our age.”

  “No, you don't look that old,” Miss Twillinger agreed.

  Harley warily eyed her backpack. He'd been around humans for a long time.

  “Say, you're not going to stick me in a bag, are you?”

  “No, I'm just doing a survey to see if we should build condos here or not.”

  “Condos?” Harley tried to scratch his brow but his paw wouldn't reach, so he had to be satisfied with rubbing his head on a nearby boulder.

  “Yes, and I'm afraid that wouldn't do. We build condos here, we're going to have to rip up all of this. That would put you out of a home.”

  “Would they have swimming pools?” Harley was thinking a squat of condos slapped up in his little valley might not be all that bad, what with garbage cans to raid and hot tubs and maybe even a pet cat to snap at.

  “Well, yes, probably; but that doesn't matter,” Miss Twillinger sniffed. “What matters is that you are an endangered species. We must save you, it is the most important thing.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, mankind has been entrusted with the guardianship of the world, of nature, of everything we see around us.”

  “By who?”

  Miss Twillinger wasn't used to being asked to evaluate her belief system by a lousy, foul-mouthed turtle. She took a swig of designer water from a plastic bottle slung to her hip hugging cargo pants.

  “Care for a drink?” she asked.

  “Don't mind if I do.”

  The turtle took a big gulp and then spat it out, “Ugg! No microbes!”

  “Of course not. It's the purest water money can buy.”

  “Don't you find something unnatural in that?”

  “Don't be silly. Now, are there other endangered creatures around here?”

  Harley nodded his head in a downhill direction, indicated the small dribble that passed for a creek, “Well, we had some little sand fish, but I haven't seen any of them for a decade or so.”

  Miss Twillinger gasped, “Sand fish! My word! Do you think any of them survived?”

  “A few did, but I ate them.”

  “You should have saved them, to preserve the natural balance.”

  Harley shrugged, “I was hungry. Oh, how about the yellow stick flower plant? Do plants count?”

  “Oh, yes indeed! That would be a very rare find! Could you take me to it?”

  Turtles not being very swift of foot, the journey of a hundred yards or so took most of the rest of the day, but just before the sun set, Miss Twillinger was thrilled to see the only example of a yellow stick flower plant, which until now had been considered extinct.

  “I like to eat the little yellow flowers,” Harley explained, extending his neck and snacking on the closest bud.

  “But you mustn't!” Miss Twillinger shrieked. Unfortunately, in her haste to educate the ignorant and ancient turtle, she fell on a sharp boulder next to the creek and badly fractured her left leg, snapping the bone half way between her knee and her foot.

  “Help me!” Miss Twillinger wailed.

  Harley lifted his heavy shell in an attempt at a shrug, and slowly began to pad away.

  “It's not good to hang with the weakest in the pack,” he said.

  “Pack? There's no pack here.”

  “Even worse,” Harley replied over his shell without pausing or looking back.

  “I was going to save you,” she cried. “You can't just leave me like this.”

  His exit, though slow, was inexorable, and after a half hour, Miss Twillinger found she was alone. It was odd, because just over the dark humps of the nearest hills, she could see the glow of the MacDonalds and the Shell station, and if she listened hard enough, she could make out the relentless hum of drive-time traffic on the freeway.

  The pain was intense. She knew her biology; the jagged and exposed edge of bone had cut some vein or other, which would explain all the blood. She had to do something to keep her wits about her. She ran through the chemical chart by heart and recited all the genus and species that she could think of, starting with the invertebrates and ending up with Homo sapiens, and then going back down again through the monkeys and the birds and the amphibians and the fish…she couldn't remember. She swam in and out of consciousness. As darkness descended, she hoped someone would happen by and discover her plight. But she knew that wasn't likely. She remembered how hard she had fought to fence off this small and secluded basin from picnic trash and rutting young lovers who didn't know or even care if they were rolling around on ordinary mustard weed or precious yellow stick flower plants.

Fences, however, meant nothing to the coyotes. They roamed over the hundred and fifty acres she had helped preserve as if it were a playground. And in no time at all, the first coyote showed up. He sniffed at the blood and looked hungrily at the cracked bone sticking out of Miss Twillinger's shin.

  “Marrow!” he said, his eyes shining and tongue licking greedily.

  The End