the creature from the other side. Together they heft the dead weight up onto the deck.
Pat grins with delight at the mate. “Hurry, get that bucket of J-hooks.” She pulls out her knife from the leather holster belt strapped around her waist. She grips the knife and slashes at the dolphin’s thick dorsal fin, curved up high from the center of its back. The blade cuts through the fibrous veins of the fin in a spurt of blood.
The mate comes back with the bucket of barbed J-hooks. Pat pushes sliced bloody dolphin meat onto the hooks. She wipes sweat off her face and looks up. “Perfect bait—the turtles always think it’s drifting squid.”
Pat goes into the pilothouse and throws the engine switch. The engine growls to life in a loud metallic clang of firing pistons. She steers the boat out on a new course. The mate feeds the baited hooked longline off the stern into the slashed V-wake of the propeller-churned water behind the boat. The longline whirrs away into the distance, sinking from sight beneath the water.
The sun smacks down on Pat at the back of her boat; she is cranking the wood handle of the line-winch, which reels in the longline trailing in the water. The mate works next to her, hoisting the longline onto the deck. All the longline’s barbed hooks are stripped of dolphin bait. Pat keeps cranking the handle; the veins on her neck pop out purple. The last of the longline left in the water jerks, goes taut, whirs back out. Pat grips the handle tighter, puts all of her strength into trying to stop the line from stripping farther out behind the boat. The mate grabs the handle with Pat. They strain together, groaning as their muscles burn, holding the longline. The tension reverses toward Pat and the mate; they crank the winch handle harder. The longline in the water comes closer to the boat.
The gray humped shell of a sea turtle crests above the water. The steel barbs of a J-hook are sunk deep into one of its thrashing front flippers. The turtle aggressively flaps its free flipper against the water’s surface, struggling to turn its great weight against the hook that holds it to the taut line.
Pat whoops with joy. “A leatherback! Jackpot!”
The mate holds the winch handle steady.
Pat grabs a heavy net. She leans off the side of the boat and casts the net across the water over the splashing turtle. She holds the rope attached to the net as the turtle’s bulk thrusts against its sudden entrapment.
The mate jams the winch handle into the locked position. He joins Pat in holding the net rope against the fury of the turtle. They are pulled to the edge of the boat. They lean dangerously off the side of the boat, about to fall into the water, pitting their combined weight against the turtle. A mighty thrust from the turtle knocks Pat and the mate off balance, and they fall to their knees on the slippery deck. They hang on to the rope, pulling back harder, groaning as they haul the turtle up from the water and heft it aboard. The turtle’s bulk crashes onto the deck in a booming thump, its massive shell glistening; its prehistoric sharp-beaked face snaps from side to side as it gasps in exertion with humanlike sounds.
Pat gazes at the formidable animal before her. “What a beauty. Must be a hundred years old. Big money in the fin meat. Chinese are convinced eating it will give them King Kong hard-ons to bang their girly friends all night long.” She throws her head back, joyfully singing out at the top of her lungs an old pop song, “All night long, forever!”
The mate wipes sweat off his tattooed chest. “Yeah, Chinese will pay a fortune.”
The turtle powerfully slaps its long leathery flippers against the deck, futilely searching for water to make its escape. The hollow gasping from its beaked mouth becomes desperate; its bulging sea-green eyes gape up at its captors.
Pat picks up an iron mallet and grips its handle. She mounts the netted turtle. Her legs straddle both sides of the humped shell body. She raises the iron mallet, takes aim at the back of the turtle’s exposed head, and swings. The mallet penetrates deep into the turtle’s skull with a bone-shattering blow.
The mate stares at the turtle’s crushed skull. His face cracks into a downward frown. He turns and leans over the railing of the boat, spewing