This is the best summary I could come up with:

One day in the late summer or early fall, likely during the administration of Governor Pa Ferguson in the 1910s, an alligator snapping turtle hatchling poked his head out of the rubbery eggshell that had been his home for the previous few months.

Around then, Brutus, who rarely broke the surface of the creek, venturing upward only to breathe, might have had to studiously avoid humans for the first time: divers competed every year in a trash festival to clean up the water.

One day, over lunch, a wildlife official in Jasper County mentioned he had recently been called out to a traffic stop because some men were caught with a pickup truck loaded with alligator snapping turtles, which they were taking from Texas into Louisiana.

Twenty minutes into the conversation, Colo started regaling Guidry with stories of the old days, including one about the time he had borrowed his mother’s “little car,” tied his pirogue on top, and gone fishing for turtles.

Fish and Wildlife employees unloaded Brutus and Caesar from plastic tubs they’d hauled in on a trailer and set them down on a packing blanket in front of the grand Tuscan columns outside the U.S. attorney’s office in Beaumont.

L. J. built a shrine to his father in the corner of his shop, complete with ceramic ducks, a picture of a deer, several shell casings, a whiskey jug, and two preserved alligator snapping turtle heads.

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