HEARTWOOD CHAPTER

On Bear Branch Creek

By Robert Dailey

A fall front has passed through southeast Texas, bound for nobody knows where. These storms are born in the cool northern Pacific and rush cater-corner across the country. They strew snow in the West and rain in the South and East.

Stumbling south along the Gulf of Mexico, the cold fronts become confused. They meander this way and that, eventually becoming warm, sucking more rain from the mild Gulf waters. Mosquitoes, hiding from the cold, come out and welcome the warm backhand.

At the approach to the creek, leaves of the muscadine grape and American beauty berry are changing into their fall uniforms. The pulp-laden seeds are gone, eaten by beast or fowl or fallen back into the soft forest compost.

I cross a rivulet of water, and almost step on a tiny snapping turtle. I pick it up gingerly, although it is no more than four inches from head to tail. Even a small snapping turtle can deliver a nasty bite.

The common snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina) is still fairly common across North America. It's a smug-ugly creature, a squat face with a hooked beak and wide, unforgiving jaws. Native Americas ate its meat, grilling it over a fire, often cooking it right in its package. Afterward, they used the empty shell, filled with dried corn kernels, as a rattle in rituals.

European and African Americans liked the meat too, albeit in a more "genteel" form. Turtle soup "au sherry" is a fine and delicate New Orleans Creole dish, made from the meat of the common snapping turtle and Andalusian liquor.

As a child, I paddled through the Louisiana swamps along Bayou Plaquemine Brulee and watched large snappers, some perhaps reaching fifty pounds, sunning themselves on the bank. On a dare, I once teased one. It promptly clamped its massive jaws on my oar, removed a chunk of wood half the size of my hand, then sidled slowly into the coffee-milk colored water.

I also remember a family story of a great uncle who was missing the index finger of his right hand, taken, it was told, by an angry snapping turtle. As the story went, a fisherman had caught a large one and placed it in a gunny sack. My curious uncle approached the fisherman and asked what he had inside the sack. The fisherman reportedly replied it was a snapping turtle. Doubting Thomas that he was (and obviously not the sharpest knife in the drawer), my uncle poked the bag with his index finger. The gunny-sacked creature retaliated to this intrusion by removing my uncle's digit.

I set the baby snapper right at the water's edge, it's forelegs touching the water. It waited a moment, then scuttled into one of my muddy footprints, almost disappearing, only the peaks of its ridged back showing.

A small pawpaw sapling grows not twenty feet away from where I find the turtle.

It's been said that runaway slaves ate pawpaw fruit and deposited its seeds along the various Underground Railroad routes for brethren who followed. One such tale reports that you could follow the Underground Railroad from the South to the North by tracing the growth of pawpaws.

Like many of the stories about the Underground Railroad, it would be difficult to prove today. Most forests between southern areas and the northern terminals of that railroad were clear cut in the first half of the 20th century.

In Texas, where slaves totaled a third of the population, most runaways headed for the hospitality of Mexico instead of Canada. Although it has never been recorded, perhaps there is a trail of pawpaw trees across the coastal plains of the Lone Star state, from Houston to Brownsville.

The little plant sported quite a following. Hernando DeSoto mentioned finding the fruit during his exploration of the Mississippi River in 1541. The name "pawpaw" is actually a corruption of the Spanish "papaya", which was the misnomer DeSoto gave it. George Washington liked the chilled fruit as desert and Lewis and Clark mentioned in their journal how they depended on pawpaws during their expedition when other food was scarce.

Possums, raccoons and squirrels like it. Without it, the Zebra Swallowtail butterfly wouldn't survive, for pawpaw is its only larval host. The PawPaw Sphinx Moth also relies on the plant as dinner for its pre-resurrection children.

Not far from the pawpaw bush, the skeleton of a doe lays on its side stretching across a grassy glade. At first, I worry that it might be the little buck I had viewed a few weeks earlier not far from this spot. But it is a doe, I am almost sure. If I add flesh to the bones and set the carcass upright, it would appear she stopped in mid-run, fore- and back legs bent slightly inward, almost meeting in that brief nanosecond during which quadrupeds actually leave the ground.

To my left, a gurgling stream plunging through a bed of stone makes me think I am back in the San Juan Mountains of New Mexico. Alas, the water, though clear, is discharged from the local water treatment plant. The treatment plant rises from the woods sporting beige and green paint, as though those colors, in some way, mitigates the intrusion of the stark metal buildings, pipes and stacks. And the brook-like look and sound of the water gushing from it does not disguise the roar of the engines laboring to remove unwanted elements.

I follow the discharge stream to its confluence with the creek. There, in a deep pool, a shoal of fairly good size bluegills ((Lepomis macrochirus), stand guard at the merging of the two streams of water. A lone bass swims at the fringes of the bluegill squadron.I walk toward them for a closer look. Disturbed by the reverberations of my footsteps and my shadow on the water, the bluegills and the bass disappear in a dozen swirls.

When fly fishing in the Rockies, I learned to stalk trout with my face toward the sun, not with it at my back. Wary game fish, conditioned by millennia of predator shadows, will swim away quickly when they see one. Even the slim silhouette of a fishing rod will send some fish scuttling for cover.

The movement of the fleeing fish must have warned another denizen for a cloud of mud and sand billow up from the bottom. It is probably a turtle, waiting on the bottom for a meal to float by or to be dropped by one of the bluegills that hovered above a few seconds earlier.

The rising silt cloud is large. I had spotted several mid-sized red-eared sliders along the creek and wonder whether the rising mud is the result of a departing slider or one of the parents of the little snapper I had found. I am not sure that the size of the habitat along Bear Branch Creek could support a mating pair of snappers, but female snapping turtles will travel miles to find a suitable place to lay eggs. It could well be that the little tyke I found earlier was the offspring of a pair that lived in a larger body of water nearby.

A bright, late autumn sun warms the grasses, but it is falling lower on the horizon and I know the air will begin to chill as it falls behind the trees. A lone mosquito buzzes my face, but does not bite. A breeze, flowing along the creekbed, shakes loose red sweet gum leaves which crackle to the ground.

I turn on my heels and walk downstream again, past the doe's white bones, past the blue gills which swirl again, past the little stream where I found the baby shelled serpent. I am careful how I move across, nudging the toes of my boots forward in a sliding motion instead of stepping, hoping to feel the infant's hard shell scraping against the rubber. I find no turtle, but feel relieved that it has moved on.

A light but cold breeze flicks the side of my neck and rolls down the inside of my collar. The sky is blue, the late afternoon meadow is gold and the trees at either side of the creek are turning from brown to black as the sun blinks through them. It is time to go home.