A Return to the Diamondback Terrapin

 

or Sebaquanash, "the man who weeps"

   Feeling well enough to do it for the first time in three years, I recently went back to a spot where a certain stone effigy resides on a “stone wall” on a little hill above a salt marsh on the CT shoreline. I dropped my bicycle on the ground off the pathway when I reached the first of the stones near “the site,” not only because I still haven’t fixed my kickstand yet but also so I can just step over the bike and then lift it to get back on instead of painfully throwing my leg over it, a simple little old man’s dance step to avoid the pain in his hip.

   I remember thinking that I may not of been here at just this time of day or I would have noticed how a perhaps snake head-like stone by the trailside seems to have two possible eyes, one closed and one open, a "thing" that happens to occur on some possibly modified stones "sometimes," in some vague unscientific sounding terms:

(Did somebody peck an "open eye" in this stone below long ago? I don't really know...)

    I also notice that many of the little paths into places I've been before are overgrown, mostly in Greenbriar and Poison Ivy. I can barely even see the stone above that I sometimes imagine as the resting place for the stone above - where it may have once been balanced, where it once may have rocked, a Drum Stone or a Signal Stone at the Hill:

I stopped at another spot where another of my little trails were also overgrown, another place where the modern trail disturbs the older one, where a row of stacked stones reaches out into the salt marsh:

Older Photos:

August 2021 photos and overlays:

      I do notice that someone has cleared some brush from along the hillside remnant of the disturbed qusuqaniyutôk: 

And I saw why:

 - but the older trail up to the top of the hill is so faint that I can't quite see it from a geocache site in the "stone wall." I pushed the bike through the underbrush and saw some deer scat - and then more and then more - and then there's evidence of browsing by deer, making the spot I was headed to incredibly brush free, as if those deer were doing an old man a favor...

It's an easy walk to this spot above, a new segment cleared by the deer, suggesting a course of stone laid out to resemble - or become - a snake:

And qusuqaniyutôkanuk, on the stone wall, is a Turtle Tobacco Offering Stone:

Opposite side, looking west:

105. Terrapin. "The name of various sea-tortoises or turtles of the  waters of the South Atlantic coast of the United States. The word  is derived from one of the southeastern Algonkian dialects, as indicated by the Virginian torope, " little turtle," Lenape tulpa, turpa,  "tortoise," Abnaki  toarebe, " tortoise," - the toonuppasog of the  Eliot Bible (Lev. xi. 29) is cognate. In the early writers the forms  tarapin, terrapene, terebin, etc., occur, while the negroes of the South  have adopted the word as tarrypin. Our word terrapin is from a  diminutive, as Whitaker, who wrote in I623, unconsciously recorded,  when he spoke of "the torope, or little turtle.”

 Algonkian Words in American English: A Study in the Contact of the White Man and the Indian Author(s): Alexander F. Chamberlain Source: The Journal of American Folklore , Oct. - Dec., 1902, Vol. 15, No. 59 (Oct. - Dec., 1902), pp. 240-267 https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/533199.pdf