NATASHA NOWAK’S strong arms strain to hold Chunky Chip in position. “He’s probably the third largest one we’ve ever had,” she says. Chunky Chip, whose shell is the size of a gladiator’s shield, weighs forty-eight pounds. He’s so big and powerful that Natasha and her partner, Alexxia Bell, need to use an electric screwdriver to secure, and then remove, the screws holding the lid shut over his gigantic stock tank.
As Chunky’s scaly, clawed feet whirl, Natasha, forty-four, grips the turtle’s slick carapace while she perches on the swivel stool near the operating table. With her right hand, Alexxia, forty-six, pries apart the turtle’s sharp jaws with a gynecological tool. An array of surgical instruments await nearby, but none is more important than the object for which Alexxia now reaches: a champagne cork. She pops it into Chunky’s capacious gape. The cork does double duty: it keeps the turtle from biting and props his mouth open for the coming procedure, which must be done while he’s awake. With a patient like this, anesthesia is avoided whenever possible.
Yesterday, Alexxia drained an abscess from a puncture wound left by a fishhook—the larger of two wounds that brought Chunky here from the Marblehead pond that had been his home for perhaps the past hundred years. He now has several new pockets of pus inside his mouth that need draining. Alexxia touches one of them with a dental instrument. Chunky lunges, nearly dislodging the cork.
Then Alexxia’s cell phone rings. She grabs it from a holster on her leg and wedges it between shoulder and ear. “Hi, Mom!” she says. I hear her mother’s cheerful chatter on the other end, until Alexxia cuts her off. “Let me call you later, okay?”
Mothers are used to hearing their grown daughters say they’re too busy to talk, but Alexxia has the perfect excuse: she’s doing oral surgery on a very large, wild, and fully alert snapping turtle.
THIS TIME OF YEAR, the phones are always ringing: A Good Samaritan has found a snapper hit on the road with a broken shell. An animal control officer is coming with a painted turtle chewed by a dog. A volunteer retrieves from a pond a snapping turtle with the bolt of a crossbow through the neck.
Each spring is nonstop crisis management at Turtle Rescue League—ever since Alexxia and Natasha established a hospital for freshwater turtles and tortoises in the basement of their suburban home in Southbridge, Massachusetts.
Amid all the other houses on the street, their two-story saltbox stands out: It’s a blazing, neon green. It bears a sign in front that reads, “Turtle Lover Parking Only. Violators Better Shut the Shell Up.”
Parked in the drive are a white smart car and a black Scion. Both are mounted with strobe lights—like the ambulances they are.
