Hunting for the Already Hunted

As I got older I spent more time in the woods, traveling countless hunting trails (although never veering off my usual path due to my horrendous sense of direction), and finding almost mystically impossible fields of yellow daisies. I would look for bones and find small ponds that were if nothing but an endlessly thriving ecosystem. 

Although it sounds a little bit strange, finding bones in the woods is one of the most exciting feelings (infinitely more exciting than hunting helpless animals and watching the life fade from their eyes), they aren't as common as you would think, and there is nothing more satisfying than finding more than one bone (or if I was really lucky, a skull). So to the behest of my parents it became a hobby, searching for bones, cleaning them and taking care of them. I would travel to my usual trails armed with a plastic bag or two; bones are notorious at tearing holes in crappy grocery store bags. I learned my lesson one day when I had lost a rodent skull (a lucky and rare find) that slipped out through a broken bag, a grave disappointment that I realized when I started heading home.

My favorite find, a mouse skull.

I often use bones as a reference in my art; just like finding bones, drawing bones is extremely gratifying. It gave me a large appreciation for the beauty of the basic structure that holds a large majority of living beings together. I eventually found what I refer to as my 'bone graveyard': a small area of the woods, just off the trail (okay, sometimes I left the trail), where bones of infinite and often unknown things were dumped by the hunters and other residents around the woods. A large majority of them were deer, but sometimes I would be lucky enough to find something else (I found a large skeleton once that couldn’t be anything besides a cow or a horse).

Bones are beautiful, amazing, and under appreciated. Even after an animal passes on, the bones continue to live on for several days, depending on the species of animal. They continue the process of making tissue and healing, and the cells lay dormant until they eventually die. Bones are an example of how nature can be so magical and amazing; despite the stigma they face for bringing about the reminder of death. They should at least be appreciated as living things rather than viewed as a reminder of something macabre as death.