11/25/11 ERICK'S SPIKE BUCK, AND A GRAVE DISCOVERY

PINK SKY IN THE MORNING

ERICK'S SPIKE BUCK

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A GRAVE DISCOVERY

HEADSTONE BASE?

ANCIENT HEMLOCK

Friday, 5:30 PM.  41 degrees in the woods, wind ENE, strong enough to roar trough the treetops at times and sway the tallest trees.  It was a quiet, warm morning but the wind picked up by early afternoon.  It was pretty much cloudy all day.  It was very quiet again otherwise.  I did hear some far off coyotes about 10:00 AM, but otherwise, except for an owl hooting a few times, there was no other animal or bird activity at all.  Currently the barometer is way up.
    I came home for lunch, and found that friend and neighbor Eric had  bagged a spike buck this morning, the second of only two deer he had seen so far this season from his stand way out in the boonies.  That gave me the incentive to hunt hard again this afternoon, but to no avail.
    While poking around in the woods this morning I unexpectedly found what I am sure is a headstone, I doubt nature would have created so many right angles and flat surfaces on granite.  I found a second stone, perhaps the base,  about twenty feet away.  There is no remnant of a habitation in the vicinity, I don’t know if this site was ever farmed, and it has obviously been cut over a number of times.  The grave site is on a little hillock, and there is one ancient hemlock near the stone, so I am assuming it was a family cemetery, or perhaps a single grave, a distance from home and barn.  Who is buried here?  How old… man, woman, or child?  What was their story?  I didn’t feel particularly sentimental or philosophical today so didn’t try to spin any yarns to entertain myself.  The heavy stone had no inscriptions on it and I assume it is lying face down.  This area wasn’t settled or farmed much before the mid-Nineteenth Century, and the hemlock looks to be at least that old, perhaps older.  Maybe it was even planted by mourners at the gravesite.  I won’t disturb the stone more than I already have by brushing away leaves and dirt.  Perhaps it will be another century or two before someone else comes across it.  Perhaps a thousand years, after all traces of our own times have long disappeared. 
    At the rate our civilization is deteriorating all our last several centuries of artifacts may well be lumped together by some future archaeologist and we alive today and the dead of a century and a half ago will all occupy the same time frame, perhaps called something like “Meso-American Culture Prior to the Great Downfall.”