The Bone Bed

What he got wrapped up in was about fifty feet of monofilament lines, three of them, and wire leaders with rusty hooks. I’m guessing the rig got free of its fisherman float at some point, drifted on the current, and got snagged up with that buoy line.”
    He points to the one attached to the yellow boat fender.
    “And then the turtle got snagged in the fishing line. But like I said, that’s just a guess,” Klemens says. “We won’t know until everything’s recovered, and I’m assuming it will be you doing that?”
    “Yes. When we’re done here and he’s safely back in the water and out of range.”
    “Seems like he’s got very minor injuries, so they won’t be trying to transport him, not that they could have,” Klemens says. “You’d need a flatbed truck, and he probably wouldn’t have survived rehab anyway. There’s never been a leatherback from around here that did. All they know is the open ocean, swimming from continent to continent. You put them in a tank and they just keep swimming into the side of it until they beat themselves to death. Pelagic creatures don’t understand what a wall is. Kind of like my sixteen-year-old son.”
    I watch the rescue team in green Windbreakers and latex gloves, the leatherback puffing out his throat and making ominous sounds, whistling and clucking, and I scan the bright choppy water. I think about what I need to do. There must be at least a dozen boats around us now, people attracted by the strobing red lights and the stunning creature on board, and no telling what’s already hit the Internet.
    I don’t want an audience when I recover the body, and I sure as hell don’t want it filmed by smartphones and the media. What terrible timing for me to retrieve a dead body from water, and I think uncomfortably of Mildred Lott and my idiotic comment about her turning into soap.
    “The blond girl there.” Klemens nods at Dr. Pamela Quick. “She says he’s the biggest one they’ve ever seen, maybe even the biggest on record, close to ten feet long and more than a ton, and could be a hundred years old. Take a good look, Doc, because you’re not likely to ever see something like this again. They don’t survive long enough to get this big anymore because of boat strikes and entanglements and ingesting trash like plastic bags and party balloons they confuse with jellies. It’s just one more example of us wrecking the planet.”
    Two transom steps lead from the dive platform up to the recovery deck under us, which is crowded with four marine biologists, and piles of towels and sheets, and tough plastic cases, ski bags, and other field kits containing emergency drugs and rescue and medical equipment. From where I’m standing, downwind of the leatherback, I detect his briny smell and hear him scraping the platform as he strains against his yellow harness, his every movement slow and heavy and suggestive of enormous physical power. The loud blasts of his breaths remind me of air moving through a scuba regulator, and then his throat expands again and he emits a deep guttural roar that makes me think of lions and dragons and King Kong.
    “You hear that behind you on a dark beach, it would be a heart attack,” Klemens says.
    “What else have they done so far?” I ask.
    “Cut the lines off of him.”
    “I hope they saved them.”
    “I’m not sure what you could tell from them.”
    “You never know until you look,” I reply.
    “PIT tagged him right before you got here, and I can tell you he doesn’t like needles,” he adds.
    Pamela Quick works a spinal needle deep into the neck for a blood draw, while a second rescuer, a young man with brown shaggy hair, reads a digital thermometer and announces, “Temp’s up two degrees. He’s starting to overheat.”
    “Let’s get him covered and wet him down,” Dr. Quick decides, and she glances up at me and for a moment we are eye to eye.
    They drape the ridged carapace with a wet white sheet, and I recall her tone to me on the phone earlier, her adamant way of telling me what she needed to do. It was my distinct impression that she didn’t believe she required my permission and didn’t want my involvement, and now she just looked at me resentfully it seemed, as if I have something personal with her that I know nothing about.
    She squeezes ultrasound gel on the turtle’s neck, moving around a handheld Doppler probe with a built-in loudspeaker to monitor the heart rate. The sound of the massive reptile’s