I consider these events to be weird or at the very least unusual but then I’ve never lived in rural Southern Appalachia before. Maybe this type of stuff happens all the time here.
Now I have another mystery on my hands—the mystery of the two skulls.
Let me set the scene. When I found the young deer hanging from the fence about two months ago I had to dispose of the body. My son and I cut off its head and threw the body into a wood line away from the cabin. We placed the head on a red ant hill under a stout plastic barrel. The idea was to let the red ants pick the skull clean so I could hang it on a wall in the workshop. It seemed like a suitably country thing to do. What man doesn’t want the skulls of dead animals decorating his man cave?
Mindful that there are animals around here who would like nothing better than to have a deer skull as a play toy I placed six cinder blocks on top of the barrel to prevent animals from getting to the skull. I felt comfortable that the skull was protected. So I was a little surprised a few days ago when Meredith told me that there was a deer skull in our yard.
Sure enough, there was a clean, bleached skull sitting on the grass. I could see the barrel out in the field, and it still had the cinder blocks on top of it so I knew it had not been tipped over. I figured some animal had burrowed under the barrel, gotten the young deer’s skull and left it in our yard.
I didn’t think anything more about it until a couple of days later when I was walking our new dog in the field near the plastic barrel. I noticed there were no signs that anything had burrowed under the barrel so I took the cinder blocks off and looked underneath it. To my surprise the deer head I had placed there was still there. If you’re following the story so far that means I now have two deer skulls on my property.
The other thing I noticed was that skull under the barrel was significantly smaller than the deer skull in my yard, and I concluded that the new skull came from an adult deer.
A day or two later I saw our dog chewing on a large bone in the yard. I assumed it was one of the many chew bones we give him. He has a habit of taking them out of the house to chew. The yard is littered with them. But when I investigated I discovered he was chewing on one of the long bones that make up a deer’s leg. What's more, he had gathered a couple of other long bones from a deer. Given the size of the bones it is clear that they came from an adult deer and not the juvenile deer I found hanging on the fence.
I suppose it’s not surprising that there are two dead deer carcasses in the vicinity of my property. There are a lot of deer around here, and deer hunting is a favorite sport in these parts. Come hunting season, it seems like every Tom, Dick and Harry is crawling through the woods with a rifle or a bow trying to bag a deer. It has occurred to me that a good way for a guy around here to commit suicide in a way that his wife can still collect on the life insurance policy is to strap a couple of antlers to his head and walk noisily through the woods during hunting season.
But one thought keeps nagging me. I was under the impression that most hunters do not butcher a fallen deer in the field. I think the usual practice is to gut the deer and haul the body, skull and all, somewhere to butcher it. If that’s true then you’re not going to find a lot of deer skeletons in the woods. Moreover, I’ve told this story to a number of people who have lived here for some time, and they think it is unusual for deer parts to keep showing up in my yard. Obviously, it is not a commonplace occurrence.
I suppose it’s possible there is a real Daniel Boone-type in the neighborhood who knows how to butcher a deer and disposes the carcasses in the woods. That might explain why there are deer bones in the vicinity.
Of course, there are many other possible explanations. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that a deer died of natural causes about the same time another deer got hung up on my fence. Maybe I live in the Appalachian equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle for deer. Maybe my dog that is part paleontologist, and he is trying to gather enough deer bones to construct a complete skeleton.
The bottom line is that I’m not sure what to think about the mystery of the two skulls. All I know is that I have enough chewed dog bones, deer bones and skulls littering the yard around my cabin that it’s beginning to resemble a Neolithic hunter-gatherer’s camp site. When I moved to the cabin I was seeking a simpler life but I was not intending it to be Stone Age.
I guess this is just another example of how life in the country is so different from life in the suburbs.
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