The Bone Bed

endangered turtle who almost died because of reckless, careless human beings.”
    “And I’m not one of those reckless, careless human beings.” I understand her hostility. “I want him to thrive as much as you do.”
    She glances up at me condescendingly, angrily.
    “Let’s do this,” I then say. “Tell me what you know.”
    She doesn’t reply.
    “I’m not the one wasting time,” I add pointedly.
    “HR thirty-six, RR is two. Both times by Doppler,” she says. “Cloacal temp is seventy-four degrees.” She drips blood into a white plastic i-STAT cartridge.
    “Is it unusual that his body temperature is some twenty-five degrees higher than the water he was in?”
    “Leatherbacks are gigantothermic.”
    “Meaning they can maintain a core temperature independently of the environmental temperature,” I reply. “That’s rather remarkable, and not what I’d expect.”
    “Like the dinosaurs, they can survive in waters as warm as the tropics or cold enough to kill a human in minutes.”
    “Certainly defies what I understand about reptiles.” I squat near her as the boat sways back and forth and water laps.
    “Reptilian physiology is unable to explain the biology of dinosaurs.”
    “You’re not really calling this a dinosaur?” I’m baffled and strangely unsettled, considering how my day began.
    “A gigantic reptile that has been here for more than sixty-five million years, the earth’s last living dinosaur.” She continues to act as if I’m to blame. “And like the dinosaur is about to become extinct.”
    She inserts the cartridge into a handheld blood analyzer while frigid water splashes over the platform and soaks the cuffs of my coveralls and begins to wick up the legs of my pants underneath.
    “Fishing gear, ignorant people digging up their eggs, illegal poaching, speedboats, oil spills, and plastic pollution,” she continues, with undisguised disgust. “At least one-third of all leatherbacks have plastic in their stomachs. And they don’t do one damn thing to us. All they want to do is swim, eat jellies, and reproduce.”
    The leatherback slowly lifts his watermelon-sized head and looks directly at me as if to emphasize his caretaker’s point. Nares flare as he exhales loudly, his protruding eyes dark pools on either side of a beaklike mouth that reminds me of a crooked jack-o’-lantern smile.
    “I understand the way you feel better than you’ll ever imagine, and I’m eager to get out of your way,” I say to Pamela Quick. “But I have to know about his injuries before I can finish up here.”
    “Moderate abrasions circumferentially around the skin-carapace line of left distal shoulder extending about three centimeters on distal posterior margin of the left-front flipper,” she describes with steely affect. “Associated with an abraded area of the distal leading edge.” She reads the blood test results on the digital display.
    “And his values?” I ask.
    “Typical for entangled leatherbacks. Mild hypernatremia, but he should be fine. Until he encounters some other human detritus or a boat that kills him.”
    “I can understand how you feel about it. . . .”
    “You really can’t,” she says.
    “I need to ask if you saved the fishing gear.”
    “You can have it.” She reaches inside a ski bag.
    “Based on your expertise, can you reconstruct what happened?”
    “Same thing that always does to these animals,” she replies. “They run into a vertical line, freak out and start spinning around, and get wrapped up in it. The more they struggle, the worse it gets, and in his case, he was dragging a heavy pot and a body for God knows how far.”
    “And dragging the buoy.”
    “Yes. Dragging that, too.” She hands me a transparent plastic bag that contains tangled monofilament, several leads, and rusty hooks.
    “What makes you assume the body and pot were dragged? It seems you’re assuming they weren’t originally where they are now. Any reason to suppose he might have gotten entangled here, where he was found?” I label the bag with a permanent marker.
    “Leatherbacks are in perpetual motion,” she answers. “The monofilament probably was entangled with the buoy line. What we do know for a fact is he hit the fishing lines, and his left flipper got wound up, but he’s programmed to keep swimming. The more he swam, the tighter the lines wrapped around him, it would seem. By the time we got to him, he could barely move his left flipper, and he was going