Change on Tuvalu

Nobody saw the shark coming except for her. Even if they had, it probably would have been too late. But she did not know that then. There were more pressing issues to consider in this time, in this place. And at first, there had been no shark, anyway. How the tides can shift.

The green turtle had bathed in the cover of darkness that came only at this magical time of night. As she emerged from the lagoon, gravid and determined, the water glittered off her back in the light of the stars overhead. With a stolid swing of her front claws, the turtle rocked her pregnant body from side to side, a physical lullaby for the eggs she carried inside her swollen stomach.

At first, the sand melted away with the surf and she allowed the waters of the reef to swell beneath her body, riding the rising tide inland to the beach. The ground hardpacked with wetted sand of high tide. As the mother turtle flippered her way up and onto the narrowing beach, there was the faintest hum of blue tugging at the corner of the horizon. Dawn was still a ways off, but she would need to work quickly if she were to complete her maternal rituals before the fishermen collected the tackle and unmoored the boats from the dock. Flecked paint inscribing the numbers of men bobbed up and down with the current as the boats rose and sank on an ocean steadily rising. The ropes securing the boats to the long, wooden planks of the dock had given way to industrial chains since the last season she had been here, but the mother turtle paid no heed. The boats were not her concern.

She climbed the grassy embankment, each paddle of her water-tested claws gaining purchase in the slickened sand now crusting onto her body. Welcome camouflage even in the early morning hours as she trekked onward to find the perfect place. Her eggs would need to lay close enough to the water that her babies would find their way to water with as few predators as possible, but not so close that that the rising ocean would swallow them whole before they even had the chance to hatch. There is no chance for a baby turtle, still developing, to be born “en caul” if the egg is lost to the ocean. The green turtle shuffled another meter back into the brush jutting out of the grainy beach. A mother can never be too careful.

When at last she reached the hilly summit, the green sea turtle looked out over the beach where she herself had hatched not so many cycles ago. When the archipelago of Tuvalu became the world’s smallest sovereign country. The indigenous people of the island trading coins emblazoned with the creatures of the islands for fish, figs, and bananas. The smell of pulaka roasting for hours in the village inevitably wafting down to the shore even before sunrise. The husks of coconuts provided ample shading material.

The three reef islands and six atolls once protected by the reef now fast falling into the murky uncertainty of the waters below. This one island of the nine, now uninhabited. At least, by man. A shell of what it had once been, though she was not aware. The mother turtle watched a lone spider-conch drift on the foam and settle in the sand, empty.

Even as she began to power through the tan powder with her back claws, the mother turtle was aware of the screech of bats wheeling overhead. The infinitesimal movement of a lizard in the cooling sand before he scrambled away to find his next meal. All those creatures going about their own lives unbothered by her, and she by them. Inextricably linked by that ephemeral spark of life in the reef.

On her journey through the protected aquamarine waters, she had swum right over the sister stingray and brother octopus. Her powerful legs propelled her over the red-eyed crabs clambering among the boulders in the shadow of nighttime under the reef water. As she had entered the lagoon, flying fish had consoled her as creatures who themselves knew the shearing movement that tears the heart living in two worlds—both above and below the water. But they would never know what it was to lie, hushed in early embers of pre-dawn on land to seek out the spot upon which to stake the survival of your species.

The mother turtle scooped the sand with a quiet efficiency as if to remind nature that there was, in fact, a certain way of doing things. She was excavating the land with a sweeping rhythm now, focused on creating a home for her clutch of precious eggs. As she was nearly done driving her clawed feet into the earth to prepare the space, she became suddenly aware of the solitary fin that cut through the water.

The shark fin was a knife to her gut and the mother turtle hunkered down in the cool, sandy space she had intended for her babies. Instinct had brought her this far, but this was a sight unfamiliar to her. A phenomenon for which she was not programmed. The mother turtle scanned her surroundings and watched as the dorsal fin glided this way, then that, over the placid waters much too shallow for the young tiger shark attached to it.

She watched as the panic rose to a fever pitch and the shark made one desperate bid for freedom, flinging herself onto the beach. She writhed, scales glinting as water sluiced down her sides and slid onto the unforgiving sand.

The tug of blue at the horizon was now stretching up toward the heavens. Daybreak was coming, but there would be no men to throw the writhing shark back into ocean, nor to put her to good use after she had dried herself out. Her carcass would lie there for an eternity, maybe longer, before the ocean rose high enough to carry the bones back to the land from which she had come.

The tiger shark whipped its body this way, then that, each attempt growing feebler than the last. With a gargantuan effort, she rolled herself over and the turtle mother found herself staring into one, terrified, unblinking eye. She did not want to die; the turtle mother understood that. She would have felt the same way if only they had met underwater an hour earlier. But now, even as the green sea turtle deposited her clutch of eggs in their newly-made home, she was a silent witness to agony the shark. Separate beings, connected in the cycle of birth and death.

Help me.

I cannot.

Save me.

I cannot.

Then leave me.

I cannot.

They lay together for a time, the shark and the mother turtle. The mother turtle wept for the mother of the young tiger shark, somewhere out in the vastness. She wept for man who might try again to reclaim the fishing boats and build stronger barricades for the next season. But in her heart, she refused to weep for her own clutch of eggs, now laid safely in the sand in this one, precious moment of time. After the shark stopped twisting, she fidgeted for several minutes, then lay still as her eyes grew glassy and opaque. The pink-orange of the horizon reflected in the clouds gathering in the unseeing eyes of the shark as the mother turtle scooted what sand she could over her clutch. Burying them as best she could, the mother turtle trundled past the empty gaze of the shark and into the sea as though she had never been there at all, but for a trail in the sand already disappearing under the waves.