Digging Up Bones

Life is full of surprises. Life at Crossed Sabers Ranch is full to overflowing with surprises. I love it!

We sat on this bit of information for a while until we knew what we might have on our hands. What we have are some old bones.

Last month, while renovating the chicken coop, I was inside of it using a shovel to clean up the floor. Suddenly, the shovel hit something solid. Wood. Interesting. Did the coop have a wooden floor? Was it just a hunk of old plank? This was back when Richard was here helping us with the coop. I called him in, since G.W. was away on a supply run. 

After a bit of scraping, a curved edge appeared. A circle!

What on earth? A well or cistern cover? It's right in the middle of the chicken coop. 

I've got to tell you, I read far too much. And I read Stephen King and Dean Koontz so you know where my mind was going with this wooden circle. I was already imagining psychotic clowns coming out of the hole that this was covering up. Or giant alien insects who will invade our minds and gradually turn our physical bodies into them! Or this is an old graveyard and the zombies are coming, or the ghost of an Indian Medicine Man....Ahhhhhh!!!!! I'll never sleep again!

Some more scraping revealed a hole in the middle of this wooden what-ever-the-heck-it-is.

Richard popped the thing up. It's just a big, heavy wooden circle thing. I suddenly realized what it was. The end of a spool from wire or cable. Nothing odd or scary at all. Just something ordinary. Disappointing! 

What was under it? Dirt. Dirt that was different from the dirt around it because it was damp.  Oh jeepers creepers! I just know there's a clown under that dirt! 

Richard used the hori hori to dig around a little and a bone popped free. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. You wanna talk about being creeped out!  It wasn't the clown! It was the victim of the clown! Any second now and a bony hand will shoot up from the earth, grab me by the throat and drag me to my underground doom!

He dug a little more and another bone came up. Then another. We decided to stop digging at that point because we really didn't know what we had.

They were large and looked like vertebrae. The size led us to believe they were not human bones, but we didn't rule it completely out.

That's why we stopped digging. In the unlikely event they were human remains, we didn't want to dig anymore. It could be Jimmy Hoffa!  

Seriously though, in case they were human we didn't want to disturb the area. In my mind, instead of the freaky clown, I now was picturing CSI Colorado crawling all over the ranch. I imagined the big white tent with a crew sifting through the dirt from the chicken coop looking for more bones. Where would the chickens live while they were doing all of this?  Who would pay for alternate chicken housing? How would my horses react to news helicopters hovering low over the field? My mind works in very odd ways!

Through Richard, we sent the bones to the New Mexico Museum of Natural History. The initial exam showed them to be the bones of a large hoofed animal, possibly even a bison. The animal was definitely butchered. No word yet on how old they are, but they might be fairly old.  An expert associated with the museum is going to have a look and let us know what exactly we've got. 

But we know it's not human. And not an evil clown, or an alien insect. 

For now, we wait to hear back from the museum. It's probably some steer that was butchered 75 years ago. What ever it is, the rest of it is probably under my chicken coop. Weird.