Snapping Turtle Quotes

Not all nine-fingered girls have hatchets, she said in Tradertalk. Some of us just tried to have a conversation with a snapping turtle. (Sandry to Daja, referring to her conversation with Tris.)

Gregori jolted back. "Snap! You couldn't control one measly mortal?" Roman clenched his fists. "No." Gregori slapped a hand against his brow. "Snap!" "Why the hell are you snapping? Are you a turtle?" It was times like this that firing Gregori seemed to be the wise choice.

So he can go ride a donkey naked through the desert with snapping turtles attached to his nipples for all I care.

Big words from a guy who's trussed up like a turkey. What are you going to do, wobble over here like an upside- down turtle to snap me in half?" "The logistics of breaking you are easy. The only question is when.

How often do we name something after it’s briefest form? Rosebush, rain, butterfly, snapping turtle, firing squad, childhood, death, mother tongue, me, you.

America: Land of the free and home of the gun. We are not brave, we are cowards, or we would have done something, anything after Newtown. Instead we did Nothing.

Big words from a guy who's trussed up like a turkey. What are you going to do, wobble over here like an upside-down turtle to snap me in half?

A flower is seen only toward the end of its life, juts-bloomed and already on its way to being brown paper. And maybe all names are illusions. How often do we name something after its briefest form? Rose bush, rain, butterfly, snapping turtle, firing squad, childhood, death, mother tongue, me, you.

So with a lot of difficulty, I picked up this huge snapping turtle and slowly carried it down the road to the river. Just as I had slipped it into the water and was watching it swim away, my geology professor came up behind me. “You know,” he said quietly, “that turtle has probably spent a month crawling up the dirt path to lay its eggs in the mud on the side of the road—you have just put it back in the river.” I felt terrible. I couldn’t believe what I had done, but it was too late. It took me many more years to realize this parable had taught me the first rule of organizing. Always ask the turtle.

Pandora, meet my brothers, Leonardo and Michelangelo." "Like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?" she couldn't resist asking. "Like the Renaissance painters," Leo snapped. He exchanged a snarl with his twin brother. "I seriously hate those damned turtles.

Your brother?" St. Clair points above my bed to the only picture I've hung up. Seany is grinning at the camera and pointing at one of my mother's research turtles,which is lifting its neck and threatening to take away his finger. Mom is doing a study on the lifetime reproductive habits of snapping turtles and visits her brood in the Chattahoochie River several times a month. My brother loves to go with her, while I prefer the safety of our home. Snapping turtles are mean. "Yep.That's Sean." "That's a little Irish for a family with tartan bedspreads." I smile. "It's kind of a sore spot. My mom loved the name,but Granddad-my father's father-practically died when he heard it.He was rooting for Malcolm or Ewan or Dougal instead." St. Clair laughs. "How old is he?" "Seven.He's in the second grade." "That's a big age difference." "Well,he was either an accident or a last-ditch effort to save a failing marriage.I've never had the nerve to ask which.

eveything that comes together, falls apart," the Old Man said. "Everything. the chair I'm sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I'm gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you're gonna fall apart. the cells and organs and systems that make you you - they came together, grew together and so must fall apart. the buddha knew one thing that science didn't prove for millenia after his dead: entropy increases. Things fall apart." We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The buddah said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. when you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did. Some day no one will remember that she ever existed, i wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost, but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying away. (...) I'd tasted her boozy breath. and then something invisible snapped inside her and that which had come together commenced to fall apart. And maybe that was the only asnwer we'd ever have. She fell apart because that's what happens.

A year ago astronomers across the Discworld had been puzzled to see the stars gently wheel across the sky as the world-turtle executed a roll. The thickness of the world never allowed them to see why, but Great A’Tuin’s ancient head had snaked out and down and had snapped right out of the sky the speeding asteroid that would, had it hit, have meant that no one would ever have needed to buy a diary ever again.

A flower is seen only toward the end of its life, just-bloomed and already on its way to being brown paper. And maybe all names are illusions. How often do we name something after its briefest form? Rose bush, rain, butterfly, snapping turtle, firing squad, childhood, death, mother tongue, me, you.

PRETENDING TO DROWN The only regret is that I waited longer than a breath to scatter the sun's reflection with my body. New stars burst upon the water when you pulled me in. On the shore, our clothes begged us to be good boys again. Every stick our feet touched a snapping turtle, every shadow a water moccasin. Excuses to swim closer to one another. I sank into the depths to see you as the lake saw you: cut in half by the surface, taut legs kicking, the rest of you sky. Suddenly still, a clear view of what you knew I wanted to see. When I resurfaced, slick grin, knowing glance; you pushed me back under. I pretended to drown, then swallowed you whole.

Guns give Evil a means to expression.

Father is and always has been a cross between Attila the Hun and a snapping-turtle.

When I told my sister, who was a fashion designer in college, what I wanted to do, she said I was crazy. But once I got started, I couldn't turn back. Kimberly Goodwin, Snapping Turtle Kids

Max gripped Zena’s hand and they ran for their lives. Their only hope was a nearby swamp. They could hide in the mud and slime, with the snakes and the snapping turtles and the razor-sharp grass. But

Two dollar a plate or a gram of gold dust,” he snapped like one of them nasty turtles in swamp lakes, and served two more customers while he was talking. “You take silver?” I held up one of them spoons. The man squinted at it then laughed, all high-pitched and mean. “Get out of here, I not a charity!

Las Vegas and the American Dream: two ideas intertwined like crossed fingers on a bloated corpse.

I had too much fun was no one's last regret ever.

Try doing that again and I’ll snap you in half before you know it.” “Big words from a guy who’s trussed up like a turkey. What are you going to do, wobble over here like an upside-down turtle to snap me in half?

Who calls the Prince of the Mud?' … The snapping turtle snapped. Its head shot out to maximum extension—Eliot wouldn’t have believed anything that big could move that fast. It was like a Mack truck coming straight at them. As it bit it turned its head on one side, to take them both in one movement. Eliot reacted fast. His reaction was to crouch down and cover his face with his arms. From the relative safety of this position he felt the day grow colder around them, and he heard a crackle, which at first he took for the pier splintering in the turtle’s jaws. But the end didn’t come. 'You DARE?' Janet said. Her voice was loud now—it made the boards vibrate sympathetically under his feet. He looked up at her. She’d gone airborne, floating two feet above the pier, and her clothes were rimmed with frost. She radiated cold; mist sheeted off her skin as it would off dry ice. Her arms were spread wide, and she had an axe in each hand. They were those twin staves she wore on her back, each one now topped with an axe-head of clear ice. The turtle was trapped in mid-lunge. She’d stopped it cold; the swamp was frozen solid around it. Janet had called down winter, and the water of the Northern Marsh was solid ice as far as he could see, cracked and buckled up in waves. The turtle was stuck fast in it. It struggled, its head banging back and forth impotently. 'Jesus,' Eliot said. He stood up out of his defensive crouch. 'Nice one.' 'You DARE?' Janet said again, all imperious power. 'Marvel that you live, Prince of Shit!

Contrary to her sister-in-law Janie’s claims, Celia hadn’t been in love with Kyle Gilchrist since her childhood—she’d simply loved to annoy him. ... Armed with childish logic, Celia made it her mission to get under Kyle’s skin as often as possible. She’d drawn hearts emblazoned with her name on every one of his school notebooks. He’d retaliated by stringing up her My Little Pony collection from a tree. She’d pushed him into the stock tank. He’d held her down and tickled her until she peed her pants. She’d put a snapping turtle in his gym bag. He’d tied her to the tire swing and spun her until she puked. All harmless pranks that demanded retaliation.

A donkey?” the poor man wailed. “What do I want with a donkey? I cannot even feed a donkey.” “No matter,” replied the donkey. “Reach into my left ear.” The poor man, though shocked that the donkey could talk, nonetheless reached into the donkey’s ear and pulled out a sack of feed. “Well, now,” the poor man said. “That’s a mighty handy ear. I wish it had food for me as well.” “Reach into my right ear,” the donkey said. And so the poor man reached into the donkey’s right ear and pulled out a loaf of bread, a pot of butter, and a meat pie. Joe went on like this, spinning out the tale, with the poor man pulling all sorts of things out of the donkey’s ears: a stool, a pillow, a blanket, and, finally, a sack of gold. I loved this story, but I always listened uneasily, fearing that something bad would be pulled from the donkey’s ears. Even after I’d heard the tale many times, always the same, I still worried that the poor man might reach in and pull out a snapping turtle or an alligator or something equally unpleasant and unexpected. Sensing my fear, Joe would say, “It’s only a story, Naomi, only a story.” He suggested that I say to myself, “I’m not in the story, I’m not in the story”—a refrain I could repeat so that I would feel less anxious. And so each time the poor man would reach into the donkey’s ears, I would tell myself, I’m not in the story, I’m not in the story, but it didn’t help because a story was only interesting if I was in the story.

GOD I am ready for you to come back. Whether in a train full of dying criminals or on the gleaming saddle of a locust, you are needed again. The earth is a giant chessboard where the dark squares get all the rain. On this one the wet is driving people mad—the bankers all baying in the woods while their markets fail, a florist chewing up flowers to spit mouthfuls here and there as his daughter’s lungs seize shut from the pollen. There is a flat logic to neglect. Sweet nothings sour in the air while the ocean hoots itself to sleep. I live on the skull of a giant burning brain, the earth’s core. Sometimes I can feel it pulsing through the dirt, though even this you ignore. The mind wants what it wants: daily newspapers, snapping turtles, a pound of flesh. The work I’ve been doing is a kind of erasing. I dump my ashtray into a bucket of paint and coat myself in the gray slick, rolling around on the carpets of rich strangers while they applaud and sip their scotch. A body can cause almost anything to happen. Remember when you breathed through my mouth, your breath becoming mine? Remember when you sang for me and I fell to the floor, turning into a thousand mice? Whatever it was we were practicing cannot happen without you. I thought I saw you last year, bark wrapped around your thighs, lurching toward the shore at dawn. It was only mist and dumb want. They say even longing has its limits: in a bucket, an eel will simply stop swimming long before it starves. Wounded wolves will pad away from their pack to die lonely and cold. Do you not know how scary it can get here? The talons that dropped me left long scars around my neck that still burn in the wind. I was promised epiphany, earth- honey, and a flood of milk, but I will settle for anything that brings you now, you still-hungry mongrel, you glut of bone, you, scentless as gold.

All stories are incomplete. Yet in order to construct a viable identity for myself and give meaning to my life, I don’t really need a complete story devoid of blind spots and internal contradictions. To give meaning to my life, a story needs to satisfy just two conditions: first, it must give me some role to play. A New Guinean tribesman is unlikely to believe in Zionism or in Serbian nationalism, because these stories don’t care at all about New Guinea and its people. Like movie stars, humans like only those scripts that reserve an important role for them. Second, whereas a good story need not extend to infinity, it must extend beyond my horizons. The story provides me with an identity and gives meaning to my life by embedding me within something bigger than myself. But there is always a danger that I might start wondering what gives meaning to that ‘something bigger’. If the meaning of my life is to help the proletariat or the Polish nation, what exactly gives meaning to the proletariat or to the Polish nation? There is a story of a man who claimed that the world is kept in place by resting on the back of a huge elephant. When asked what the elephant stands on, he replied “that it stands on the back of a large turtle. And the turtle? On the back of an even bigger turtle. And that bigger turtle? The man snapped and said: ‘Don’t bother about it. From there onwards it’s turtles all the way down.

You're in there somewhere." He tapped at her collarbone. "You'll pop out again when-Well,when the time is right. But for now,you've slipped entirely inside your past. Like a cute little turtle in a borrowed shell.Except it's more than that.When you're in Lys's body, your very beings are entwined, so all sorts of good stuff comes with the package.Her memories,her passions,her manners-lucky for you.Of course,you also have to grapple with her shortcomings.This one,if I recall,puts her foot in her mouth with some regularity.So watch out." "Amazing," Luce whispered. "So if I could just find Daniel,I'd be able to feel exactly what she feels toward him." "Sure,I guess,but you do realize that once I snap my fingers,Lys has obligations at this ball that don't include Daniel.This isn't really his scene,and by that I mean,no way the guards would let a poor stable boy in here." Luce didn't care about any of that. Poor stable boy or not,she would find him. She couldn't wait. Inside Lys's body she could even hold him, maybe even kiss him.The anticipation of it was almost overwhelming. "Hello?" Bill flicked a hard finger against her temple. "You ready yet? Get in there,see what you can see-then get out while the getting's good, if you know what I mean." Luce nodded.She straightened Lsys's black gown and held her head a little higher. "Snap to it." "And...go." Bill snapped his fingers.

Growling softly, Peril opened her mouth again. The next two pieces sailed straight past her head, but the third finally splatted between her teeth, and she snapped her jaws shut around it. It felt like a cold slimy frog had just leaped into her mouth. She chewed for a moment, as long as she could bear it, and then swallowed fast. “No,” she said. “Definitely no. Horrifying amounts of no. That was one hundred percent disgusting.” Turtle laughed. “You’re so wrong,” he said. “It’s awesome. That’s how fish should be eaten.” “Blergh,” Peril said strongly. She hopped to the next boulder, heading for the shore. “I’m going to find something that is the opposite of fish, scorch it, and then coat my tongue with char to get that taste out of my mouth. YUUUCK. You are the worst. I would be so justified in setting you on fire while you’re asleep tonight.” “Duly noted,” Turtle said serenely. “Did I mention I’ll be sleeping at the bottom of the river? You know, if you’re looking for me.” He grinned at her. Peril paused on the riverbank, squinting at him. She had been joking, of course. There were a number of excellent reasons not to set Turtle on fire, which outweighed any potential benefits to doing so. But it unsettled her for a moment to realize that by sleeping in the river — even by standing in the river right now — he could foil any plan she did make, if she ever needed to burn him up. Not that I would. Probably. I most likely would never need to. And I wouldn’t want to, of course, that, too. But she’d never run into a situation where someone could stop her like that, apart from Clay. Maybe I did have an unfair advantage fighting SeaWings in the arena. If I were fighting them in their own part of the world —

Grammar perfect books are for Ivy Leaguers in Ivory Towers. My book is a sandcastle built on the beach of usefullness.

Once she had asked about Mrs. Hobbs promotion, what then? "Mrs. Hobbs, all the students are scared to death of you. Rumor has it that you hate kids. Is this true?" No. "Mrs. Hobbs, a ghost made me pick you for my class project. Do you have any idea who it might be?" No way. "Mrs. Hobbs, your nickname is the Snapping Turtle. Would you care to comment?" No, no, no.

A large horsefly accidentally flies directly into her oral cavity before she can speak. Outside in the air, this creature doesn’t seem that big, but from inside her mouth it feels like that giant flying reptile Rodan she once saw in a movie on cable. Her jaws are no match for this frightening pest, who, temporarily blinded in panic, begins biting her tongue with its tiny bloodsucking mouth. But Marsha is ready for any curveball nature might throw her. At first she considers spitting out this invasive monster, but then her reflexes take over and her snapping-turtle-like tongue, hidden behind her freshly glossed lips, rips the unwanted tormentor from the roof of her mouth, and with one bite of her cavity-free teeth, the execution of this pesky intruder is complete. Yes, she swallows.

As he ruminated, his beard tickled Elphaba's neck, and she snapped the wings off her wooden sparrow. She sucked on it like a whistle. Twisting away from him, she ran to a glass lens hanging from the projecting eave, and swatted at it. "Don't you break that!" said her father. "She cannot break that." The traveler, the Quadling, came from the sink where he had been washing up. "She just turned her toy into a crippled," Frex said, pointing at the ruined birdling. "She is herself pleased at the half things," Turtle Heart said. "I think. The little girl to play with the broken pieces better.

Quadlings consider to fight," said Turtle Heart. "Because they think this is only the start. When the builders to test the soil and to sift water, they to learn of things Quadlings are smart for ever, but Quadlings to keep still." "Things you know?" "Turtle Heart to speak of rubies," he said with a great sigh. "Rubies under the water. Red as pigeon blood. Engineers to say: Red corundum in bands of crystalline limestone under swamp. Quadlings to say: the blood of Oz." "Like the red glass you make?" said Melena. "Ruby glass to come by adding gold chloride," said Turtle Heart. "But Quadling Country to sit atop real deposits of real rubies. And the news is sure to go to the Emerald City with the builders. What to follow is horror upon horror." "How do you know?" snapped Melena. "To look in glass," said Turtle Heart, pointing to the roundel he had made as a toy for Elphaba, "is to see the future, in blood and rubies." "I don't believe in seeing the future. That smacks of the pleasure faith," said Flex fiercely. "The fatalism of the Time Dragon. Pfaah. No, the Unnamed God has an unnamed history for us, and prophecy is merely guesswork and fear." "Fear and guesswork is enough to make Turtle Heart to leave Quadling Country, then," said the Quadling glassblower without apology. "Quadlings do not to call their religion a pleasure faith, but they to listen to signs and to watch for messages. As the water to run red with rubies it will run with the blood of Quadlings.

June is the mother of potentials, ducklings swim bravely perhaps to the submarine jaws of snapping turtles, lettuces lunge toward drought, tomatoes rear defiant stems toward cutworms, and families match the merits of sand and sunburn over fretful mountain nights loud with mosquito symphonies.

Not all nine-fingered girls have hatchets,” she said in Tradertalk. “Some of us just tried to have a conversation with a snapping turtle.

I created a new marketing slogan for Teaching Snapping Turtles: "Read this. You're not gonna like it.

Living life without humor is like eating food without taste buds.

I’m that same David Crockett, fresh from the backwoods, half horse, half alligator, a little touched with the snapping turtle; can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride upon a streak of lightning and slip without a scratch down a honey locust; can whip my weight in wildcats and, if any gentleman pleases, for a ten dollar bill he may throw in a panther …

Think about it. When you reach 18 you're no longer an underage drinker. This means that drinking is no longer an act of rebellion, and so there's no point in doing it any more. You've got to find some other way of looking hard in front of your friends, like attaching weights to your testicles and swimming naked through the snapping turtle pond at the zoo

Our neighbors had always thought us vaguely mad to swim in the pond—someone had seen a snapping turtle more than once—but Poppy and I scoffed at their timidity.

My goal on this beach trip was to find the snapping turtle I’d befriended the previous summer and feed him the lipoma I’d had cut out of me in El Paso.

You’re not expecting us to jump to that?” I asked, worried. “I’m not expecting anything. We’re doing it.” With that, Erica sprang over the railing onto the whale skeleton. She sailed through the air and landed perfectly atop the skull with an agility and finesse I knew I didn’t have in the slightest. I looked around for another way out. The only other exit was blocked by the government agent, who was digging himself out of the dinosaur toys. He had a livid glare in his eye and a plesiosaur jammed in his ear. The SPYDER agents appeared to have lost us, but the government agent was threatening enough. I jumped over the railing. To my surprise, I landed deftly atop the whale skull. Only, the perfect balance thing was completely beyond me. I pitched forward and nearly took a header into the piranha display below. Erica caught me at the last instant and steadied me, but my weight had thrown her off balance too. She now pitched forward herself and had no choice but to leap from the skull and catch onto the lip of the model humpback whale. The cables supporting it strained under the sudden jolt. One snapped free from the ceiling and the whale shifted wildly. Erica swung from the whale’s lip, launched herself into a backflip, and stuck the landing in the middle of the hall. The tourists gathered there all applauded, impressed. As though they figured the Smithsonian had started hiring circus performers to spice things up. Erica looked to me expectantly. So did all the tourists. Now I had potential death and performance anxiety to deal with. Knowing I couldn’t possibly do what Erica had just done, I carefully shimmied down the metal framework that supported the whale skeleton—and still biffed the dismount. I fell backward and landed on my butt atop a large sea turtle. The tourists groaned, like I had let them down.

Kid, this is October you can make the maples blaze just by stopping to look, you can set your clock to the barks of geese. Somewhere the grandfathers who own this town lean down to iron crisp blue shirts, their faces bathing in steam, and blackbirds clamor in packs, make plans behind corn. You know this, you were born whistling at crackling stars, you snap your fingers and big turtles slide out of rivers to answer. You can swim one more time in the puddle of sun in your water glass, taste icicles already in the white crunch of your lunch apple. Go to sleep. I’ll put on my silver suit and chase the sky into the moon.

Bile rose in my stomach, and I gagged a bit. Snapping turtles ate dead humans? Now I'd really heard it all. "Gross," I whispered, and Steele gave a short laugh.

I'm protecting you, you incredible little snapping turtle.

Dara pinched the bridge of his nose, no doubt fending off a headache she’d brought on him. Madelyn-induced headaches tended to come on him regularly and had ever since that incident with the snapping turtle when she was ten, although that honestly had not been her fault. “What have you done now?” he said. “Stop looking at me that way,” she said. “It does not inspire confidence.

Kevin awoke, not with the slow realization that came from regaining consciousness, nor with the startled gasp of a man having a nightmare, nor even the groan that was stereotypical of anime characters when they wake up—no, when Kevin woke up, it was to the feeling of a hand being shoved down his throat. His eyes snapped wide open. However, he still couldn’t see anything. His eyes perceived nothing beyond the amalgam of blurred colors, mixing and matching and morphing and changing, a sickening compendium that his mind couldn’t comprehend. Images flashed past his vision. A walk on the beach. Red hair. A swell. A raging torrent, an infinite tide of water rising into the sky, cresting against the heavens. He tried to cough, to hack, to something, but it was no use. The hand remained shoved firmly down his throat. And then it was gone. Kevin gagged, and then coughed out what must have been several gallons of water. Each cough wracked his body with pain. Each breath caused his ribs to creak. Even the slightest movement hurt. Something appeared in front of him. It was a blurry green object. What… the… heck? “I’m glad to see that you’re awake,” the shape said. Kevin blinked. “Tell me, how many fingers am I holding up?” “Fingers…” Was what he meant to say. “Fssshrrsss…” Was what he said. “Hmm, it seems your eyesight is a bit unfocused. Here, let me fix that for you.” Kevin would have asked what this object—person? — meant, but he never got the chance—because something smacked him in the head. Hard. “Ouch!” Kevin covered his face with his hands. Gods that hurt! What the hell was he just hit with? A mallet? “What the heck was that for, you crazy coot?!” “Ho? Can you see me now? How many fingers am I holding up?” Kevin was about to answer, but words fled when he realized who—no, what stood before him. Scaly green skin covered a small, squat body, clothed in a plain brown robe. This… thing stood with a stoop. It had a hunch of some kind, and Kevin was certain that the robe was covering something big attached to its back. A really long neck protruded from the robes, which was attached to a reptilian and very bald head. It was holding up three fingers. Mainly because it only had three fingers. “Holy crap, it’s a Ninja Turtle!” The “Ninja Turtle” twitched. “I am not a Ninja Turtle!” It shouted. “Don’t confuse those sea turtle rejects with me!” “Holy crap, it talks!” More twitching. “Of course I talk, you idiot!

Don’t go skinny-dipping with snapping turtles.

The tall, stately pines that grew in drier soils soon gave way to the curving, dripping beauty of the cypress that thrived in the swamp. The ground sloped downward, giving a body the subtle sense of being pulled into the bottomlands that waited patiently just around the corners, where the dark heart of the marsh beat with a symphony of life. Stinging, singing, ancient, and deadly life, where the alligators were king, the snakes and snapping turtles were barons, and the woodpeckers were court jesters jangling their bells from the tops of the trees.

Here it says that snapping turtles eat crayfish, snails, insects, fish, frogs, salamanders, reptiles, birds, mammals, and aquatic plants. Gee, with a diet like that, we ought to be able to argue that they won’t be eating many fish.” “That’s good,” Greta agreed. “We could also make the case that they control snakes. My mom would go for that.

That evening my dad asked if I wanted to discuss the turtle situation. I was as ready as I would ever be, so I said okay. Of course he expected to do all the talking. I hadn’t told him yet that I was preparing a case. Just as I expected, he began by pointing out that we had to be considerate of the summer people who came here to fish; they wouldn’t want a lake full of snapping turtles. When I answered that I was ready to present the other side, he looked surprised. “Snapping turtles have to live beside and in water,” I began, “and we don’t. We can live anywhere. We come to this lake because we like it. Turtles live here because it’s been their home for millions and millions of years, and they can’t live anyplace else. If we kill everything that eats what we eat, what will the earth be like? Think of that!” I left out the arguments about controlling snakes and the question of how many fish the turtles actually might eat. But what I said seemed to go over with my dad. “I think I’d like you on my law team,” was all he said. That night Greta and my dad and I went together in the boat to the lake outlet. There we released twenty turtles. Four had already made their escape. They were last seen moving off our beach into my brothers’ fishing water.

We’re getting off track,” Dolf said. “My point was that our goddess doesn’t make mistakes, and she’s not punishing you. Yes, the werewolves have a reputation of being assholes. Yes, they can be speciesist… and the same could be and has been said of us. Maybe it’s time for them to make a change too.” “I’m supposed to be the instrument of that change? I’m not brave like Kirk or Lawson. Marshell can just about kick anybody’s ass. Me? I’m a beta. I’m not even the strongest beta here.” Aidric’s voice rose. “But you’re steady,” Brier said. “And steady wins the race,” Remi added. “Oh, are you for real? This is not the turtle and the hare fairy tale the humans use to teach kids with,” Aidric snapped. “No, but I bet you can make that were cry wolf,” Remi said quietly. “You are the most unrelenting of all of us. You never give up. Never. That’s your strength.” Aidric laid his head on the table. “I’d have to leave here.” Dolf ran his hand over Aidric’s hair. “Eventually, yes, you would. That kills me, but I want what’s best for you.” “You think this is it?” Aidric sniffed. “Bast doesn’t make mistakes. What she does she does for a reason. We just might not be able to see it at first. As much as I’d hate losing you, this is your future and your decision. You’ll always be welcome here, you know that,” Dolf said. Aidric sat up and hugged Dolf. “Thank you