Dem Bones

 It might have been a moose bone protruding from the woods onto the road shoulder. It was too big for a deer and there hadn't been a cow or an ox anywhere near here in a hundred years. Human enough, then, to get my attention in the first place and just bizarre enough in a landscape littered with bones to make me pull over for a closer look. Odder even than finding a human femur on a remote stretch of roadside, this turned out to be a plastic legbone of the sort you'd find dangling from the pelvis of a skeleton in high-school biology class. Of course, I'm not sure what I would have done with a human femur, but had it turned out to be the bitter end of some massive denizen of the Maine woods I would have brought it back to my wife to arrange within the ossuary that's transformed our cottage by the sea.

 

   

      We set aside the wishbone from last week's pullet in the faint hope that it may bring at least one of us some luck one day, although last Thanksgiving's wishbone still hangs from the kitchen sconce and, to tell the truth, at this point in our lives the consequences of not having a wish come true can take most of the fun out of the pulling. After all, in wishbones, some gotta win and some gotta lose, and if you're both wishing for more or less the same thing, well, what's the point? On the other hand, to ignore this little fetish, to willfully discard it with the Pope's Nose seems reckless, so we rinse them and dry them and put them up to cure and await that moment when we need an edge.

   Where we live the rocks and woods are littered with bones and if whales and seals had wishbones, someone would have dragged one home by now. There would be some powerful mojo indeed in these talismans, but the skulls and bones we gather along the littoral seem to contain their own, irresistible magic that often compels us to great and terrible lengths. Years ago a dead Minke washed ashore on the western side of the Point and slowly festered and fell apart within the jagged rocks over the course of the summer. By October most of his bits and pieces had been tumble-washed, crab-picked  and strewn about the crags and fissures, leaving only the massive head as testament to the creature's size. Disregarding the intense stench, we scrambled down the weed and barnacles, hooked our arms through the eye sockets and began the slow, nasty work of hauling nearly a hundred pounds of blubbery, slime- coated skull up onto the rocks above high water. Four or five feet of tapered “eye-of-round” proboscis bobbed about like a dowser's rod, throwing us off balance and requiring in the end a full-body embrace of the fetid trophy. Reeking of aged decay, harassed by our own delirious dogs and coated with a sort of putrid Crisco we stumbled home to discover that nothing short of gasoline would even begin to remove the carious gel. Nonetheless, exhilarated by our prize and efforts, with the vast skull now safe atop the highest rocks at the tree-line, it all seemed somehow worthwhile and we looked forward to retrieving the cranium the following Spring. By Christmas our hopes were dashed. Even a winter storm could not have washed the skull from its perch, but someone under the Leviathan’s spell had come along with a truck and hauled it off.

   We had better luck a few years later when a hump-back carcass came to rest on the rocks. By the time we arrived, the community at large had picked up most of the further-flung bits and what remained of the bone structure was still firmly embedded in rotting flesh. Not to be deterred, my bride crawled right into the rib-cage and, with her pocket knife, began sawing at the cartilage holding the ribs in place, actually retrieving a few before near asphyxiation forced her to back off. As if possessed, she was back the following morning only to find the skull had absconded in the night. As no one could possibly have carried that rotting, leathery mess very far, it didn't take long to discover the head high up in the gorse, partially covered by the stove-in hull of wrecked dory. Ignoring wild rose thorns and poison ivy, three of us hauled the skull a hundred yards or so further down the tree-line to our own hiding place where it wintered over safely. 

   

     A nasty jab from a bone shard finally dampened my wife's enthusiasm for the more surgical approach to collecting. A trip to the emergency-room and her subsequent inability to explain exactly what she thought she'd been doing inside that whale has at least tempered her bonelust. And we've come to learn that collecting the remains of marine mammals is against the law, despite the fact that folks around here have been doing it for generations. Maybe the wound was pay-back for losing sight of the dignity of that whale, of being perhaps too greedy in pursuit of whatever magic these old bones contain. Still, we will never be entirely cured of this obsession; we'll keep our eyes peeled for that bit of vertebrae, that perfect seal or gull skull, that fragmentary scrap of mojo. Wish us luck.