by Derek Hansen
The moon sat higher in the sky and lasted a little longer, but it was soon as dark and still as it had been the night before. Aubrey sat in his diving gear, his camera and light close at hand, ready to drop over the stern the instant the turtles showed on his fish finder or he heard the telltale bluh of their breathing. A school of tailor passed beneath, followed by a school of what Aubrey was sure were jewfish. Normally this would have had him on the edge of his seat in anticipation of a hook-up. Instead he felt only disappointment. Midnight came and brought with it the peak of the tide. The water around his Bertram settled as the force of incoming tide and outflowing river held momentarily in balance.
That was the instant the first red splotch appeared on the screen. Aubrey grabbed his camera and light but hesitated, eyes glued to the screen. The single red splotch could signal the return of the turtles but also the presence of a large shark. He waited for another splotch, hoping to see a repeat of the pattern of turtles rising to breathe.
Bluh!
The moment he heard that wonderful, priceless sound he climbed over the transom onto the swim platform and gently lowered himself into the water. He let his weight belt take him down to five metres before releasing air into his buoyancy vest to arrest his descent. He adjusted pressure until he’d achieved neutral buoyancy and turned on his light.
Nothing.
Suspended sediment washed down by the river limited the range of his light to around five or six metres. Would it be enough? He began to revolve, moving his torch slowly up and down, desperate for any sign of movement.
Still nothing.
He completed three-sixty degrees and contemplated his next move. If he descended visibility would probably decrease. If he ascended visibility would improve but he’d probably also lessen his chances of spotting one of the turtles. Yes, they rose to breathe but, according to his fish finder, they tended to congregate in mid-water and lower. He decided to stay where he was and complete another revolution. As he began his turn he felt something grab the fin on his right foot. He almost screamed in fright. It had to be a shark! He jerked his leg away and shone the torch down where it had been . . . just in time to see a giant turtle glide gracefully away into the depths, out of range of his light and of his camera. The instant rush of fear and the sudden excitement at seeing his quarry combined to make his heart race at a rate it hadn’t achieved for years. He felt the onset of dizziness and light-headedness and forced himself to calm down. After several deep breaths, he continued his turn. He hung there, peering into the beam of light, searching for movement. Would they return or had his sudden movement when he’d withdrawn his foot scared them away?
Something closed around his left fin, surprisingly gently for a turtle noted for its powerful beak and the large crushing surfaces of its jaws. Aubrey slowly directed the beam of light towards his feet, camera poised for what may be his only chance of a photo. The turtle let go moments before the full beam reached it. Aubrey spotted it gliding calmly back down to the depths, pointed his camera and released the shutter. The range was extreme for the conditions but he felt sure he would have captured something. But would it be enough?
He resumed his rotation. Obviously something in the way he moved or the play of the light interested the turtles enough for them to nip his fins. The scientist in him wondered if the nipping was part of a mating or bonding ritual. He was thinking about this curious behaviour when another turtle descended in front of him, not close but in the range of his light. But was it in range of his camera? He had time to fire off two shots before the turtle was lost in the depths. Aubrey hung there for another twenty minutes but made no more sightings and felt no more tugs on his fins. He surfaced, elated, tired, anxious, drained.
Did he have proof?
He placed the camera inside his dive bag and undressed. The evening was warm enough but immersion had lowered his body temperature. He shivered as he towelled down and changed into his tracksuit. He slumped into his seat knowing he’d done something no man had ever done before: he’d swum with Archelon turtles, creatures that had inhabited the oceans along with marine ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs at a time when the most ferocious carnivore the world had ever known, Tyrannosaurus Rex, had held dominion over the land. He wanted to sit quietly in the stillness of the night and absorb that wonderful fact. But there was purpose behind his presence and that purpose could not be denied.
Had the turtles come close enough?
Were the shots good enough?
Did he have proof?
‘Well?’ said Aubrey.
‘Interesting,’ said Nigel noncommittally. Nigel was a senior research scientist in the department of herpetology at the Australian Museum. He examined Aubrey’s photos through a powerful magnifying glass and checked them against the negative.
‘Interesting?’ said Aubrey. ‘Is that all you can say? For the love of God —’
‘What do you expect me to say?’ said Nigel.‘If everything you’ve told me is true I’d give my right arm to be the person who confirmed your identification.’
‘Everything I’ve told you is true.’
‘I accept that,’ said Nigel, ‘on a personal level. But on a professional level I require proof, in fact I demand it.’
‘There! There’s your proof!’
‘If only that were true,’ said Nigel. ‘I see three indistinct photographs of turtles which possibly have interesting, even intriguing features. But I can’t be sure of that. I could be looking at a new species of modern sea turtle or a variation on a known species. That is the most likely explanation. If pressed I’d have to say family Cheloniidae.’
‘What about the scale? Those turtles were between three and four metres long and that’s allowing for underwater magnification. There are no modern turtles remotely that size.’ ‘Prove it,’ said Nigel. ‘There is nothing in the photographs to indicate scale. You say three metres long but they could be thirty centimetres. If you’d left your foot in the shot you might have been able to make a case.’
Aubrey groaned. Another ‘might have been’ to add to his collection.
‘Can’t you be more positive?’ he asked.‘You know me and you know I wouldn’t invent something like this. All I want is for you to commit to the point where I’d be justified in requesting resources to conclusively prove their existence.’
‘On a lesser matter, perhaps I could be persuaded.’ Nigel shook his head apologetically. ‘But what you’re proposing is that I commit to the existence of a species that has been extinct for thirty-eight million years on evidence which, at best, is ambiguous and could not possibly stand up to rigorous investigation. I’m sorry, Aubrey, and I wish it were otherwise. You’re asking me to take a road fraught with peril and I will not do it.’
‘My whole life, my career and everything I care about comes down to these three photographs,’ said Aubrey.
‘Take some more,’ said Nigel brightly.‘This time leave your foot in the photo. And tempt the creatures closer. You give me more definite evidence and I’ll give you more definite backing. It’s as simple as that.’
But Aubrey knew it wasn’t.
Aubrey refilled his tanks and checked his equipment in preparation for another attempt to photograph the Archelon. He did it knowing he was destined to be no more successful than the night before, but he could think of no other course of action. There was no point in waiting for clearer, cleaner water because the water over the ripple strip would always be full of river- or tide-borne sediment. The sandy undulations, he now saw, were the result of sediment being deposited over thousands and probably millions of years. He guessed that the trough had probably once been a deep trench that had gradually filled in.
The suspended sediment created another problem. It reflected light back at the lens of his camera. Even if he managed to get reasonably close to one of the giant turtles, the result would still be a grainy, indistinct print, which would inevitably be viewed with scepticism. Throw in the outrageous nature of his discovery and his colleagues
and peers would automatically — and rightly — suspect a hoax and his grainy prints would only serve to confirm their suspicions. He thought of the supposed photos of the Loch Ness monster and of flying saucers — all grainy and indistinct like his. Contriving to get a diving fin in the shot would not help his cause either. It could be dismissed as a model, a balsawood or plasticine miniature designed to inflate the dimensions of a common sea turtle.
Aubrey’s spirits sank to a new low. Clearly, he would need to be freakishly lucky even to get Nigel’s qualified endorsement. He’d not only need to get within two metres of one of the giants but have a yellowtail or a tailor or some other common species of fish in shot at the same time to provide evidence of scale. The chances of that happening were laughable.
Nevertheless, he reloaded his camera, donned his gear and set out once more for the ripple strip. The worst possible breeze had picked up, a sou-westerly, strong enough to put a steep chop on the water and lift spray into his face. He motored along steadily at the most comfortable pace for the conditions. When he reached the coordinates he realised he couldn’t anchor upstream as usual because the breeze would blow the boat away from the ripple strip. So he lined up into the breeze, hoping the windage of the boat would outweigh the force of any current. The result was not entirely satisfactory and the Bertram swung capriciously from the anchor buoy. He played out enough line so that he swung in an arc over the ripple strip. The only positive thing about the conditions was that his fish finder would cover more territory and, theoretically at least, improve his prospects of getting a read off the turtles.
If they were there.
He left his navigation lights, stern light and anchor light on to make his boat easy to find after surfacing from his dive. The moon was up somewhere in the western sky but its whereabouts were completely lost behind a leaden overcast. Aubrey opened his flask of coffee, poured himself a drink and sat staring at the screen of the fish finder. An hour passed and the tide reached full flood. Nothing. He watched and waited for another hour but nothing lit up on his screen. No tailor, no Cowan young, no yellowtail, no jewfish and certainly no giant turtles. Disheartened, he up-anchored and turned his boat for home.
Aubrey tried again on the quarter moon once the weather had settled, catching the high tide on three consecutive nights, all to no avail. He stayed home for the next four nights because the high tides occurred on the fringes of daylight hours and common sense suggested that the turtles were nocturnal. If they were diurnal, someone somewhere would have seen them.
He went out to the ripple strip on the nights leading up to and past the full moon, and saw indications of jewfish, tailor and bream passing by, but at no stage did he see anything that suggested the return of his turtles. Aubrey had to consider the possibility that the turtles had been in transit, that Broken Bay was a stopover on their migratory route and they’d just rested up for a day or two. It sickened him to think that he’d have to wait a full year for another chance at a sighting. By then he really would be yesterday’s news, out of work and scratching around for whatever crumbs he could glean consulting or relieving sick or absent colleagues.
One flicker of hope remained. Perhaps, just perhaps, the turtles would return on the next new moon. If that happened, he had to be prepared and certain of gathering evidence. But what kind of evidence? Aubrey finally accepted what he’d always known: only one kind of evidence would suffice. He recalled the grace of the giant creatures as they glided effortlessly through the water despite their enormous bulk, and the playful way they’d tugged at his fins. He was well aware that, if they’d wanted to, either of the turtles could have crushed his foot and ground it to pulp. But neither had; instead, they had touched him with their gentleness.
Aubrey abruptly dismissed the sentimental thought that the turtles had somehow ‘accepted’ him. The Archelon was the most primitive living creature on earth and its brain was capable of no more than coordinating the functions necessary for survival. The turtles hadn’t ‘accepted’ him, they’d simply identified him as not being a threat, and the nips, far from being gestures of affection, were evidence of curiosity in the same way that babies put things in their mouths. This clinical assessment helped Aubrey overcome his natural distaste for what he had to do next. He believed he had no alternative but to collect a specimen.
Aubrey had ten days before the next new moon to figure out how he was going to kill and recover one of the giant turtles. The turtles’ sheer size and the thickness of their carapace put any thoughts of using a spear gun beyond consideration. Even if he managed a lucky shot in the neck, the strike was hardly likely to be fatal and he’d end up being towed around Broken Bay until his air ran out. And even in the unlikely event that his shot proved fatal, there was the matter of the creature’s weight. A two-metre leatherback turtle weighed around six hundred kilos, which meant a three-metre Archelon would weigh well over one thousand kilos and a four-metre specimen possibly double that. These were the problems he had to overcome. In the end, his plan was beautifully simple.
When he took students on field trips his primary responsibility was to ensure their safe return. Once, on the edge of a drop-off a few kilometres out from Rabaul, a four-metre tiger shark had speared up from the depths and begun circling his group of divers. Its state of agitation suggested it was preparing to feed. Aubrey had herded the students safely back to the dive boat, putting himself between them and the shark. The tiger shark was only five metres away and projecting its jaw forward for the bite when Aubrey was hauled from the water. The experience had unnerved him. From that day on, whenever he took students on dives where an encounter with big sharks was a possibility, he took a powerhead with him.
The powerhead was a two-point-three-metre-long metal pole with a .303 calibre bullet in its tip. Decades earlier, following a fatal shark attack in Sydney Harbour, overzealous divers had all but wiped out the harbour’s population of grey nurse sharks by driving the powerhead down on their heads, which in turn pushed the bullet against a firing pin. The bullet simply had to penetrate the cartilage around the shark’s brain and the resultant explosion of metal and gases did the rest. Ultimately powerheads were banned but not before the docile, bottom-feeding grey nurses, which had not been implicated in any of the attacks, had been largely exterminated. Aubrey had a permit for his powerhead and planned to use it to kill his innocent, unsuspecting Archelon.
It was never going to be easy to get a good strike on the skull of one of the turtles, one sufficiently solid to ensure that the bullet impacted hard enough on the strike pin to fire, but Aubrey believed he’d figured out how to do it. He planned to hold the powerhead parallel with his legs and strike when he felt one of the turtles tug at his fin. There were risks — that the powerhead would hit his foot or ricochet off the turtle’s skull onto the carapace where the bullet would do nothing except scare the turtles off for ever — but he figured he’d have at least a second to work out where the turtle’s skull was in relation to its jaws. At night he practised with the disarmed powerhead, imagining the feel of the beak and the position of the head, and rehearsed the short, sharp downward thrust so that it became not only instinctive but carried every ounce of his strength.
The second part of his plan was a little easier, but relied entirely on achieving an effective strike and the virtual instant death of the turtle. Aubrey had seen film of sharks in their dying throes swim away up to fifty metres or more after they’d been hit, despite the fact that their brains had turned to mush. He couldn’t allow the same thing to happen to his turtle. Given the limited visibility and the depth of the trough, even a giant turtle could be easily lost and, once on the bottom, soon covered in silt. His plan was to follow the stricken turtle all the way down and attach a line to it with an inflatable buoy. Having fixed the location of the dead turtle, he would return the following morning on a boat used to service moorings, attach a heavy line to the turtle and use the powerful mooring winch to haul it up from the bottom. But everything hung on his
ability to deliver the fatal blow, which was why he practised.
Over the last few days leading up to the new moon,Aubrey worked hard on his lectures in an attempt to divert his attention from what promised to be the defining moment of his life and to calm his increasingly tense nerves. Sometimes at night his anxiety became unbearable as all the variables scrolled through his mind. So much could go wrong. What if the turtles failed to show? What if their brief appearance really had been the result of a migratory stopover? What if he missed with the powerhead? What if he failed to strike with enough force to push the bullet back hard enough against the firing pin? What if he only wounded the creature? What if it crawled ashore to die and someone else found it? His whole career was balanced atop a pyramid of ‘what ifs’, any one of which could bring his hopes crashing down.
When a cold front developed in the Australian Bight and hit Adelaide with winds of near tropical ferocity, Aubrey feared that all his careful planning would also be blown away. He spent hours on his computer studying the Bureau of Meteorology’s satellite weather maps. Two days before the new moon, the front began to veer south towards Bass Strait and Tasmania. Aubrey breathed a mighty sigh of relief and decided not to wait for the new moon. He would go that night.
High tide was not until 10.40 pm but Aubrey was in position over the ripple strip and ready to roll by 9.00 pm. The night was reasonably light despite the fact that the moon was in its last crescent, and the nor-easterly wind, which had reached fifteen knots in the midafternoon, had died away to occasional zephyrs. The conditions were as good as Aubrey could hope for and almost a repeat of the month prior. He sat with his eyes glued to his fish finder, expecting at any moment to see the red splotch he was waiting for. By 10.40 pm, when tide and river hung in balance, Aubrey was almost hyperventilating. There had been one false start that sent his pulse rate rocketing when a tightly packed school of whitebait had passed beneath his boat and another when a large fish, possibly a shark, had moved on upriver. By eleven he was beginning to accept that the turtles would not show and by eleven thirty he was convinced. But there was too much at stake to ignore the possibility that the turtles might turn up late so he stayed put, staring at the screen of the fish finder for another hour. Only then did he accept that his Archelon were not coming. Deflated and disappointed he turned for home, consoling himself that the new moon was still two nights away.