"Which end is the front?" a girl on the quay at Juniper Reach asks me, and she means it. Nothing at Juniper Reach resembles a juniper. The charter clerks heard a local word for "back" and wrote down a shrub, and the village kept the error along with the map. The Zaratan lies a mile offshore, about nine hundred yards from tail to chin. I tell her the front is the end with the cliff, and that the cliff is a neck drawn in. At midday the head comes out of it, wrinkled and as long as a longship, with an amber eye the width of a cartwheel. It blows a column of mist that smells of cold cellars, holds for the space of forty breaths, and sinks again. That is the whole performance. The goats on the south terraces do not look up.
The shell comes next on any survey. It carries two feet of peat, barley in terraces, four stands of dwarf alder, and a freshwater pond fed by rain that gathers in the seams between the plates. The ridges run in rows like furrows, which is why the first settlers plowed them. Families farm it from thaw until the autumn gales. One trade exists only because of the animal: Esmund Pyke is a dive-reader. He sits on the north rim with a bowl of water on a flat stone, and when the surface starts to tremble in rings he calls the farmers off. He has done it nine times in his career, and twice the shell went under within the hour.
The forward flippers hang beside the neck like two gray bluffs, crusted with barnacles the size of washtubs, which the villagers cut for lime. Boats tie up there, and only with hemp looped around a boulder. Nobody drives an iron stake into the shell. A spiked Zaratan twitches, and one twitch has already put a hull on the rocks at Lamb Steps, a shoal named for a word that meant "stair of kelp" and has never held a sheep. The animal grazes the kelp there and takes jellyfish along with it. It leaves a slick of pale oil on the water, which is how fishing boats locate it in fog, and shed plates, which roof half the sheds on the quay.
Pyke says the Zaratan has gone under every eleven years since before the charter and has never once been late. I have no means of confirming this, and the village ledgers reach back only forty years. I leave on the evening boat. From the stern I line the harbor lamp up with the north rim, as Pyke showed me, and the lamp has slid a hundred yards to the left of it since noon. The hill is going somewhere, slowly, and the barley has not noticed.
- Classification
- Island-sized sea turtle
- Habitat
- Warm shoals and open ocean
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 900 yards, tail to chin
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Open sea and kelp shoals
- Binomial
- Aspidochelys insularis
- Diet
- Kelp and jellyfish
- Temperament
- Placid, indifferent to passengers