At the very end of my short career as a surveyor, I almost found myself in another career entirely; that of a crime scene investigator.

We were on our way back from posting the no trespassing signs, when I saw Rachael’s dog Luna doing something in the bushes. I assumed it was “that” something, but it turns out it wasn’t.

Suddenly, Luna burst from the bushes with a straight up skeleton in her mouth.

It appear to be some sort of full size leg bone, one segment clamped in her teeth, and a second bone (a femur if you will) was dangling by a knee joint. The bone itself was a beautiful specimen, picked clean and bleached perfectly white, with knobby ends and everything, as if she had stolen it off the pages of a medical text book. The whole thing was at least 2 1/2 feet long. As she bounded towards us, grinning gleefully, the skeletal leg dangled and danced beside her, like some kind of spooky Halloween lawn ornament. Except this one was not made of plastic.

I literally expected a skeleton to come hopping out of the woods on one foot after her, cursing his luck.

As the dog pranced around my sister with her prize, I said, “Rachael, grab it!” to which she replied, “You get it, I’m a vegetarian!” When I finally managed to pry it out of Luna’s mouth with the claw of a hammer, I hurled it back into the woods. We then spent the next few minutes trying to keep Luna from chasing after it.

“Rachael, we have to see what this is. That looked like a human bone!”
“No way, I’m not going back there. Lets just pretend we didn’t find it.”

I let myself be convinced to leave well enough alone, when I realized we were no more than 100 feet from our camp.

“Rachael, we have to go look. I’m not going to camp here if there’s a body on the other side of the hill!”

I forged a path to where I had seen Luna digging, with Rachael trailing reluctantly behind. Luckily, it did turn out to be some kind of animal (deer I expect, although the skull was pretty damaged) (not damaged enough to know for certain it wasn’t a human though). Luna managed to snag one tasty mouthful before we were able to pull her away, which she crunched with great relish once we got back to camp.

Alls well that ends well, I suppose, although I suppose it would have made a much better blog post if it had been a body.