Oh Them Bones

In my travels around the country and the world I have gotten to see some of the greatest creations of mankind, and have been amazed by them. I once spent a day exploring the Louvre in Paris, France and stood within inches of DaVinci’s Mona Lisa, visually tracing the brushstrokes on the great man’s work. I’ve walked in the U.S. Capitol building. I have even been offered the chance to do research on the original writings of Ernest Hemingway, in his own hand. Throughout my life I’ve been constantly amazed by the ability of men and women to imagine and accomplish phenomenal feats.

But it is nature that really blows my mind.

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I’ve written before about my habit of picking things up on my journeys, specifically rocks. Just last week I picked up a fossilized crinoid (It’s an animal, but it looks like a plant!) on a walk around my farm. I stuck it in my pocket and, when I got home, I rinsed it off and stuck it on the windowsill over the kitchen sink. It will sit there until I give it to one of my grandkids or Annie tires of looking at it and adds it to HER rock collection…the one she keeps in our driveway.

You may remember the rock my sons dubbed, “The Saturn Rock,” from my column in the May 25 edition of the Delta News-Citizen and contained in “A Different Drummer Volume 1.”

One of my favorite rocks, though, is the fossilized footprint of…something. I’m far from an authority but, if I had to guess I’d say it was probably a three or four foot tall two-legged dinosaur.

That one does NOT go into the driveway.

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I used to have a short length of a tree that told the story of a beaver’s poor planning. That story will be shared in a future post.

For years I kept a piece of sassafras root, dried to perfection. The smell is one of the most distinctive pleasures in nature.

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Sea shells make up a small part of my personal museum. Some of them are fossilized so could join the rocks, and I’m sure Annie included some of them with her pothole-fillers. Most are not petrified. I picked some up on beaches along the Atlantic Ocean. I honestly don’t know where some originated but I think my sisters may have gathered some pretty ones and then forgot them when they moved out.

There are a few conch shells and one of them is my absolute favorite shell of all. Probably around 100 years ago someone found it and cut the pointy end off. A little smoothing made the shell into the South Seas equivalent of a bugle. The story of the shell’s origin has been lost with time but, somehow, it ended up in my great-grandmother’s hands. She would blow on it to call my great-grandfather and the other men in from the fields for dinner.

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Like everyone else, multicolored feathers catch my eye and I have brought home those of colorful ducks, as well as geese and turkeys. Most feathers don’t hang around very long as I have yet to discover a good way to display most of them. I know it is illegal to possess eagle feathers but, if I ever run across one, I’m telling you I will be re-e-e-eally tempted.

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You’ve heard before about the deer and elk skins hanging on the wall in my studio. The elk skin came from a cow that someone else collected the first morning of elk season one year. When I found it the hunter had already stripped all the meat from the carcass. I observed the hide several days before I decided he wasn’t coming back to claim it. So I packed it out, had it tanned, and it now graces that wall. Besides elk and deer hides, I have skins of coyote, raccoon, opossum, muskrat, and skunk. The furs are beautiful and valuable, at least to me.

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Toenails and their kin are rare in my collection. I have some elk hooves I picked up in Colorado from a young bull that someone else had shot. They took all the meat, the skin, the antlers, and just left a few bones, including the lower legs, where I got the hooves, intending to perhaps make some ceremonial rattles like my Native American ancestors might have.

There is a single claw from a 500 pound grizzly bear that a friend discovered was stalking him through the bush in Canada. Luckily for my buddy, he saw the bruin before it could attack him. He showed me the luxuriant fur and gave the claw to my sons. I’m hanging onto it until the boys decide which one of them should get it permanently.

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Horns are more common in my collection than toenails…but not a lot. I made a powder horn out of a cow horn trumpet I bought at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota. There is another powder horn I bought to actually use. When a friend passed away a few years back his wife gave my son, Bobby, a primer horn he’d made for one of his flintlocks. Now it’s mine. There are other cow horns, some buffalo horns, and a beautiful curled one from a domestic ram.

Horns are closely related to toenails so I don’t include them in the next category – bones.

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Skulls, teeth, and antlers are all variations of the same thing – bone. I don’t always pick up teeth, but I’ve found deer, horse, and cow teeth a lot of times. I used to have a lot of shark teeth I found on the beach along the Atlantic Ocean. I still have a few but I have given most of them away over the years. Usually I’ll pick teeth up just long enough to identify them, then drop them where I found them. I do pretty much the same with coyote and fox teeth. I have a nice sized alligator tooth made into a necklace that I’ll hang onto. I’ve had some boars’ tusks. Sadly most have disappeared over the years, but I have a South Seas type necklace that contains a couple in an interesting design.

A couple elk heads I found in Colorado still contained the whistle teeth, or elk ivory. These canine teeth of bull elk were once such a popular fashion statement as watch fobs and clothing decorations that they lead to the virtual extermination of the animal over much of its range. They were sometimes called elk ivory because of their resemblance to that substance. I took the ones I found and made key rings for myself and the sons who hunted in Colorado with me. Because of my love for her, I gave Annie one that my jeweler cousin, Sherman, partially encased in silver. I also recently gave her a necklace made using a single elk ivory. I think she likes it because I’ve caught her wearing it a few times.

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Deer shed their antlers every year and I always look forward to finding the bony treasures in the spring. I have an elk antler and quite a few deer antlers on top of the lockers in my studio. Something about the smooth hardness of antler invites the hand to touch them, to hold them. They start my mind wandering.

They take me back to a time walking through the central Missouri woods one spring with Annie and some of the boys. We stopped so I could pull a deer skull from its home in the forest duff. The buck had died during the winter, antlers still firmly attached to bone. Maybe it had worn itself down during the rut, then not recovered enough afterward to fight the ice and snow and cold…or maybe the coyotes pulled him down in his weakened state.

I’ve made a few knives with antler handles, including my favorite, a fourteen inch long conglomeration of steel and elk antler that would have been right at home on the hip of Daniel Boone, Davy Crocket, or any other fur-hatted pioneer.

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Between my sons and me we’ve taken quite a few bucks while hunting. We’ve kept the racks of all those that wore them. As above I sometimes find skulls of bucks that died before they lost their antlers. If at all possible, I keep those too.

There is a medium-size alligator head in my collection. Medium-size maybe, but the sharp teeth and a bite that is plenty big enough to do some serious damage make it an impressive addition to my little museum.

My Canadian friends Pat and Joe Doris had an experience that also added to my collection. The bush dwellers are far enough from public plumbing that they use a little house out back for certain necessities. One day, in Joe’s absence, Pat went to visit the backhouse and was stopped by a growling 250 pound black bear. Her dogs protected her retreat but the bruin hung around. When Joe got home and investigated, the bear threatened him too. Five shots from a .303 cut short the reign of terror. To keep from attracting more bears, Joe hauled the carcass off. Long story short, I ended up with the skull, which I bleached, mounted to an oak slab, and hung on my wall.

A beaver skull I acquired last year still has the bright orange teeth that are so strong they can gnaw through solid wood.

The upper jaw is all that remains of an opossum that the boys and I call the vampire ‘possum. The fangs are significantly longer than normal. They stick out of the mouth so that the animal really does resemble the famous blood-sucking monster.

Like beavers, rabbits have incisor teeth that continue to grow throughout their lives. I used to raise rabbits for meat and one of them must have suffered an injury that misaligned his teeth so that they didn’t wear down. Somewhere I still have the skull with teeth curling around like a crazy elephant’s tusks.

There is an elk calf skull I found in Colorado about a half-mile up the mountain from another head, this one with a story. Usually, if there’s a tale involved with something I pick up it is only what I can surmise from clues found at the site, or nearby, like the deer skull I found that coyotes had killed and eaten, or the shell of a turtle that had been hit by a car. This one is different though.

On my second trip to Colorado to hunt elk, my son, J.B. and I hunted with my friend, Randy Ballew, who lived in the state. Randy had hunted the area around the Marvine Creek Campground in the past. Before opening day of the season we headed up the mountain on a path Randy called Dead Horse Trail to scout the area. I thought the trail got its name back in the gold mining days but Randy told us about running into a guide a year or two before who shared the story of a near-catastrophe he’d experienced.

The hunting guide had been packing in on horses loaded down with everything he needed to set up a camp in the mountains. The mountainside was so steep that neither man nor beast could climb it without some serious effort. To cut down on injury and chances of heart attack, the trail had been laid out across the slope but gently rising. Standing on the trail a man could hold out one hand and almost touch the uphill slope. Reaching out the other hand would leave the appendage hanging about 10 feet above the ground down slope.

At the absolute worst spot on the trail for it to happen, one of the horses exploded. Bucking and kicking, the animal immediately tangled in its pack and saddle, then upended off the downhill side of the path. It quickly jammed upside down among some brush with all four hooves flailing.

The guide tried to get close enough to help the critter but risked at least falling down the slope, at worst falling into the flashing feet. No matter what he tried just didn’t work and put him at serious risk. The man realized both of them would most likely be seriously hurt or killed. When he was exhausted both physically and mentally, he came to the hard decision that the best he could do for the horse was to end its suffering as humanely as possible.

A gunshot did the job.

Scavengers quickly cleaned up most of the site of the tragedy. By the time we found the spot, there was not a shred of flesh on the skull or the few bones that remained. Late in the hunt J.B. and I decided we’d add the unfortunate horse’s skull to our memorabilia from the trip. Once we got home I finished the bleaching that the sun had started and now the skull of the unlucky equine who lent his story to the Dead Horse Trail resides in my studio.

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Some of these items, like fossils, I picked up for their historical significance. Others, like some of the antlers, were gathered for their potential usefulness. I hung onto things like the furs and elk ivory for their beauty. Most however were added to my collection because seeing, feeling, or smelling them remind me of experiences I’ve had in nature.

Like Annie, most people will probably think that the things in my little museum have no value beyond their potential as pothole fillers. To me, however, their usefulness as reminders has a value beyond money. As long as I have my collection and can recall what they represent, I’ll always be a rich man.

Some riches are worth more than diamonds or gold. Of course, I’d add those to my collection too…and I doubt Annie would toss them into a mud hole.

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