Hey all this talk of The Gaff reminds me that I had a weird dream last night. I dreamed that there’s a tribe, or region of tribes, with a quirky “traditional culture”. I think it’s somewhere in Minnesota where there are lots of primitive natives. These people have a strange relationship with a species of large sea turtle. It seems that the human women of the tribe(s), as a regular cultural activity, surrender their very young female daughters to the male sea turtles, for the turtles to have their way with them. The turtles do their thing, with tongues lolling out, and then subsequently they waddle over to the ceremonially reclining human mothers and cuddle for a while. That ritual complete, the male turtles are sufficiently primed to be willing and able to fertilize the clutches of eggs laid by the females of the species in the meantime. The turtle eggs are watched by the tribespeople, and towards the point of hatching they’re actually played with by the tribal children. Some scientists speculate that this play activity acts to stimulate the still-developing brains of the unhatched turtles, doing them good and readying them for a long journey out to sea.
When hatching time is nigh, the elder men of the tribe(s) carry the eggs carefully over land, clear across Wisconsin to Lake Michigan. The turtle eggs are placed on a particular holy beach and allowed to hatch on a summer night. The baby turtles wiggle their way across the sand, down to the lake water, and begin their voyage out to the cold North Atlantic. Years later, they return to be greeted by tribal elders on another ritual evening, and are carried back to the village for the cycle to begin anew.
This may seem shocking to us, but it is a working symbiotic relationship between man and para-reptile. Both cultures appear to be nourished by their activities.
