The Boneyard

This is long and it is sad but I need to tell someone.

I woke up from nightmares to find it had rained last night and the snow was mostly gone. Today was my last chance to go in the woods before I go back to school so I suited up and went out. I walked along for a while in good spirits, finding nothing (except an occupied, smelly skunk den) and practicing tree ID. I found a deer trail and followed it around for a little while and suddenly I was standing on a pile of big black feathers. Some were over a foot long and they had the classic silvering underneath of vulture feathers. There weren’t a lot and there were no bones or blood or leavings, so I figured it probably got in a scuffle with something and flew off minus some feathers. I’ve seen that happen before.

I kept going and maybe half an hour later got down to the old cow pastures. There’s a lot of old wire on the ground there so I was watching my feet carefully and lo and behold. I found another, bigger and more spread out, clump of lost feathers. Some had meat on them still. No skeleton, no sign that anything had been feeding, etc. But I kinda figured this vulture hadn’t gotten out of its predicament. I felt really bad about that so I left the pasture area.

I went back down to the stream to check around the place I found the back half of a deer skeleton last year, and I found not only left behind vertebrae from that but a whole other deer. It was trapped among a bunch of rocks on the bank. I could see clear through its ribs, there were no organs or meat left on that side. The other side was fully furred and so was the head except the underside. It was a precarious position for me so I hauled it out to some flatter, drier land. I had to cut its head off to move it because it was trapped between some rocks. It had been frozen probably, and the blood had kind of mixed/congealed with snow to form a sort of “blood slushie.” What meat was left actually... looked edible.... so I think it was a winter casualty of the recent snowfall and freeze. Its head, like I said, was messed up so I didn’t mess with it too much bc brains are nasty, so I’m not sure if it was male or female. I left it for the spring to decompose and decided to call it Frosty.

I moved on and decided to go down to Vulture’s Fall, which is the place where I once found a vulture’s wing and sternum. I was told about this bit of woods by my uncle who said that’s where the vultures roost, and I had never questioned that because of the feathers and the tons of bones I’ve found there. That’s where I found Wing/Brains last year. 

At the entrance was a single vulture’s primary. Huge long thing. It felt like a sign of some sort but there were no skeletons in easy viewing so I poked around a bit investigating the decades’ worth of trash people have dumped there. Then I found another pile of feathers. Long and black. Bird poop on some of them. A few feet from that, another pile, older, and a sternum. Past that I saw what looked to be a pile of snow, but it was out of place in an area where the snow had been rained away so I went to check it out. A pile of paler, downy feathers, in that perfect circle a cat makes with its kill. Now I was a little suspicious, like, hey, maybe there’s a den of something here, I don’t want to bother it. But also like, what cat will take a vulture? We have feral cats, but I don’t know if they would, and there hasn’t been a bobcat sighted here since the 80s (it’s been in the family since the 50s so I count that reliable).

I was at the base of a hill now. I looked up and saw what was probably a bone so I went toward it. It was another big sternum, similar in size to the other and the one I found here before. Behind a bush, more feathers. 

And all the way up the hill it went like this. Clumps of feathers, snapped bones, even a pelvis. I found another wing, all together like the one I found last year. And I started getting scared, like, how many birds was this? Would a cat do this? Was it something that had kits nearby and felt threatened by all the birds that roost here? What can take down a vulture?

Then I found some non-bird bones. A little vertebrae and a pelvis snapped in half - a fawn from the size. I grabbed them up, thankful beyond words to find something that wasn’t dead vultures, and then I looked up the hill again and I knew. I knew what took down vultures. It was an old deer stand, and all around the base, a veritable boneyard. Three disembodied skulls, a half-rotted deer skeleton, another one down to bones, one that looked like it had been there for years, and one that looked fresh, skinned out but it wasn’t blackened or rotted yet, still some blood around. Its head was separated and lay near the half-rotted one. 

And all through this, piles and piles and piles of black feathers. Just absolutely covering the ground all around these skeletons. I dropped the bones in my hands and went down to the ground, just in shock. 

I realized I was just a little ways into the neighbor’s land, literally right on the edge of the boundary, but I could see the house and I was suddenly terrified I’d be seen and maybe shot at for finding this, so I retreated back. I grabbed the skulls with no bodies, they were green and sort of soggy and I figured they wouldn’t be missed and, like me, needed to be out of this place.

I ran all the way back to the entrance from our fields, skulls clutched to my chest, past all these piles of feathers. Panicking. Trying not to cry. I got back to “safety” and just fell to the ground and sobbed. First just because of the birds, all those birds, some probably crows and therefore legal to take, but the others so big and so clearly vultures and who could do that my neighbor could do that, and then because I looked at the skulls and saw they had full or nearly full sets of milk teeth, they were all fawns or yearlings and my neighbor with his ugly house and his loose dogs did that too.

I picked them up and took them home and took a hot shower and a nap and I’ve been in a funk all the rest of the day. It’s not the dump site that got to me, I’ve seen some before and while they’re eerie they’re not inherently terrifying. But the birds. All those birds. What reason is there to shoot vultures except that they’re big and scary-looking? I’ve heard people say it before, that they’d shoot them just because they’re “dirty” and “gross.” Because they’re scared of them. 

And I realized later that all the bones I’d found before weren’t from roosts. They were washed down the slope from the boneyard. The vultures don’t live there. They die there. 

I sat on the ground and cried and cried and cursed the people who live there. I haven’t cried like that since my cats died. Big hot grief tears. This wasn’t just death. It was a tragedy. When summer comes and there’s more cover I’m going to go back and take the others, and if I ever meet that man and his stupid dogs I don’t know what I’ll do. We don’t know him and I don’t have much to lose.

The deer I brought back are called Feather, Ring, and Valkyrie. Two does, and a male that may have had antlers but had all his milk teeth.