Distinctly Montana Magazine

80 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • FA L L 2 0 2 6 I. W INTER IS LONG, BUT THE FEMALE WESTERN PAINT- ED TURTLE DOES NOT REMEMBER IT. As she wakes in spring, her head tentatively reaching out from her shell, blindly seeking the sun like a tongue for a morsel of sweet- ness, her dreams of snow and ice dissolve into the air. As what- ever passes for turtle consciousness resolves in her mind, she begins to feel the tug of instinct. In a sense, her journey began untold eons and eons ago, when her earliest ancestors first enacted this yearly ritual. Ever since then, her every cell and fiber tells her she must emerge from the morass and make her way to water. She makes her way, slowly of course, out of the mud toward the remembered water source, which may be a lake, stream or, in this case, a pond in the Nine- pipes Reservoir. Once there, she will feast on pondweed, or snails, or maybe some algae or a bit of decaying organic matter, foraging far and wide, meeting other turtles. Likely, she will mate with a male turtle and lay a clutch of eggs in a nest very much like the one she emerged from back in spring. Then, another instinct will sing her a lullaby, and she will retire in the mud once more, to sleep the winter away. But in the meantime, she faces something that her millions of years of engrained instinct will not have prepared her for. For at the edge of the mud, and the ice, and the emerging grass, is a banner of a weird grey and black material that seems to stretch into eternity in either direction—but then, the horizon of a tur- tle is short. Undeterred, she steps into the weird thing, which she does not know we call a road, and makes her way across, one plodding step at a time. If she is feeling like a speed demon, she may achieve a velocity of up to .7 miles per hour. What she cannot possibly know, or understand, is that there are large metal-and-plastic things that travel this road, and that these inconceivable conveyances move at speeds that move well more than a hundred times faster than her. She may have some inkling, honed over those millions of years of her ancestors' col- lective experiences, to fear and avoid coyotes, otters, raccoons or hawks as well as she is able. But she has no idea at all what these large and quick objects are. Nor does she have much time to try and suss out what it is, ei- ther. For she is no sooner aware that one is bearing down on her, in this small bend in the road, no sooner planted one of her by JOSEPH SHELTON S o m e N o t e s o n t h e M e t a p h y s i c s o f t h e N i n e p i p e R e s e r v o i r Pa i n t e d Tu r t l e s

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