This is an engaging portrait of a Southern woodsman whose modest livelihood depended, in part, on his knack for hunting turtles. This task he accomplished by hooks-baited lines adrift in the shallows-and by crooks-actually a razor-sharp gaffing hook he used to snag larger turtles. The film harks back to a backwater of rural America, where a person's fortunes could fit into the hull of a pirogue, and a man could choose to go to work barefoot. In images shot in a luxuriant black and white in the early 1960s, we are witness to a subsistence strategy which is currently impossible-the prey, a prehistoric-looking alligator snapping turtle, is now a protected species. Special credit should be accorded to the filmmaker, who returned to edit a film that was shot over thirty years ago.-Thor Anderson