“PIT tagged him right before you got here, and I can tell you he doesn’t like needles,” he adds.

Pamela Quick works a spinal needle deep into the neck for a blood draw, while a second rescuer, a young man with brown shaggy hair, reads a digital thermometer and announces, “Temp’s up two degrees. He’s starting to overheat.”

“Let’s get him covered and wet him down,” Dr. Quick decides, and she glances up at me and for a moment we are eye to eye.

They drape the ridged carapace with a wet white sheet, and I recall her tone to me on the phone earlier, her adamant way of telling me what she needed to do. It was my distinct impression that she didn’t believe she required my permission and didn’t want my involvement, and now she just looked at me resentfully it seemed, as if I have something personal with her that I know nothing about.

She squeezes ultrasound gel on the turtle’s neck, moving around a handheld Doppler probe with a built-in loudspeaker to monitor the heart rate. The sound of the massive reptile’s blood flowing is like the roaring of a river or a rushing wind.

“Normosol to replenish his electrolytes.” She tears open the packet of a solution set, a twenty-gauge needle attached to an IV line. “Ten drops per one mil. He’s stressed.”

“Well, I would be, too. He’s probably never been around humans before,” Klemens observes, and I’m aware of the weird familiarity I feel that isn’t about him.

A sad curiosity runs through me like a low-voltage current, then is gone, and I imagine my father seeing such a marvel. Sometimes I wonder what he’d think of the person I’ve become.

“They say a turtle like this one’s been on land only once in his life. Right after he was hatched on some beach halfway around the world and crawled across the sand and into the water. And he’s been swimming ever since.” Klemens talks expressively with his hands the way my father did until he was too weak from cancer to lift them from the bed. “So he’s not happy resting on top of something, in this case, the platform. Not to be crude about it, but the only other time he’s got something under him is when he mates. What do you want to do about her?”

He looks at the heaving water where the large yellow sausage fender bobs, which strikes me as quite odd, and I say so.

“You think it’s attached to a conch pot or cinder blocks?” I point out. “Why?”

“When they were pulling the buoy line close with the grappler to cut the fishing line and get the turtle on board?” he says. “For a couple of minutes the body was at the surface. Her head was.”

“Jesus. I hope we’re not going to see that on TV.” I look up at a second helicopter that has moved in, hovering directly over us, a white twin-engine, with what appears to be a gyrostabilized camera system mounted on the nose.