A Strange Find in the Garden

If this post was a Sherlock Holmes’ mystery it might be called “An Unusual Occurrence.” Another name for it might be “Freaky Shit at Sassafras Farm.”

A couple of weeks ago Mike and I were turning the soil in the rows of the garden. Mike was working on one row, and I was working on another. Suddenly he called out, “Come over here. You have got to see this.” I looked up, and he was staring down at something in the middle of the row he was working on. I walked over to see what it was. It took me a few seconds to process what I was seeing. I was looking at the hoof end of a deer leg sticking up about four inches out of the freshly dug ground.

To set the scene a little more precisely, my garden is large and surrounded by an electric fence. The nearest neighbor is about 300 yards away across a small valley. Not ten minutes prior I had walked down the same row pulling up frost damaged plants. The old mulch under the plants was undisturbed. I did not notice the deer leg when I pulled out the old plants, and Mike did not notice the deer leg prior to digging the shovel blade into the ground. While it is possible that the deer leg was just lying on the top of the old mulch and we just didn’t see it, that doesn’t seem likely. The greater weight of the evidence (to use a legal phrase) is that the leg had been buried or at least covered by the old mulch and was uncovered when Mike turned the soil.

After the initial shock of seeing a deer foot sticking out of the ground wore off, I reached down and gently pulled on the hoof. Out of the ground came the foreleg off a deer. I was happy about that because I was halfway expecting to find that the hoof was attached to the rest of the deer. That would have really freaked me out.

The leg was about 18 inches long and had been severed four inches above the elbow joint. There was bare bone down to the elbow joint, but the rest of the leg had fur on it and was undamaged. The joints were limber, and there was no sign that insects had chewed on the leg. Based on this, I concluded that the leg was fresh and had not been in or on the ground for more than a couple of days. Of course, I am not a deer forensic pathologist so I could be wrong. The only other clue was that the end of the exposed leg bone had been severed cleanly as if it has been sawed through.

Of course, we had to walk up to the house to show Meredith our grisly find. I think it’s a basic human trait to try to shock the crap out of other people. Our rat terrier came down the steps to see what I was holding, but once she got a sniff of it, she backed off quickly with an expression that signified “fuck that.” She wanted no part of the deer leg. Maybe she thought it was from a giant rat that was out of her league.

Of course, my mind was racing through possible explanations for the presence of a severed deer leg in my garden. As is my tendency, the more bizarre ones occurred to me first.

Was my garden the deer equivalent of the old Indian graveyard in Poltergeist? Had I disturbed the dead ancestors of Bambi? I could just hear the small voice of a child saying, “They’re here.”

Was my property the deer equivalent of the elephant’s graveyard?

Had the deer leg just fallen from the sky?

Was it a reindeer leg? Had Santa been flying a test run and had a mid-air accident?

Was this some North Georgia hillbilly idea of a practical joke? Were Clem and Billy Bob sitting around one day when the brilliant idea came to them to bury a deer leg in the neighbor’s garden? That seemed to me to be a lot of work for Clem and Billy Bob.

Maybe one of the neighbors was trying to send me a message. If so, it was a pretty obscure message. If it was a message, it was way over my head. On reflection, this theory did not seem likely to me. If the folks around here wanted to send me a message, they would not have been that subtle.

Ultimately, we concluded that one of my neighbors had shot a deer, and in the process of dressing it out, a dog had gotten hold of the severed deer leg and buried it in the garden. It is deer season around here, and I hear gunshots in the surrounding hills on a daily basis. (As an aside, the deer limit in Georgia is 12 per person, which is an indication of just how many deer there are in these parts.) One additional clue comports with this explanation. We usually see three deer crossing our gravel road as we drive out of the property. In the last couple of weeks, we have only seen two deer.

I disposed of the deer leg by throwing it as far as I could towards the fence line. As luck would have it, it lodged high in the branches of a white pine. I’m hoping that the next time Jake visits and uses the tractor it will fall out onto his lap. That should be good for a few laughs. There’s nothing like raw country humor.

In looking back over my posts since I moved to the mountains of North Georgia, several common threads occur. One of those threads is relating experiences that strike me as being uniquely rural in nature―you know, events and circumstances that you would not expect to experience in a highly populated urban area are like Pinellas County. I think it’s fair to say that finding a severed deer leg in your garden is one of those experiences.

And some of you thought that I would find life in the sticks boring.