The day found me repairing a boundary fence at the South Zuni pasture. The fence was situated in the higher, wooded area of the so-called North Ranch. This portion of the ranch was a very large triangle of land about fifty to seventy-five square miles in area. The fence I was working on was old and brittle and, being a boundary fence, imperative that it be strong and impenetrable.
At one particular area on the fence, just out of the cedars, the line crossed a rather large Indian ruin. I got to that point around lunch. I fixed the sorry excuse of a gate nearby and sat on one of the many piles of rocks that used to be walls centuries before. After eating, I spent an hour or two browsing through the mounds of dirt and rock, hoping to find an arrowhead or two. I was never that lucky, but I always found a stone implement of some kind.
With a bag of colorful pottery and a few old corn grinders in the truck, I turned to finish my job. The fence was quite old and some of the posts had fallen to pieces. One in particular was not only useless, but was occupied by a large anthill.
I moved about five feet from the remains of the existing post to get a new post planted. The position of this new post was only a few yards from what used to be a small, square house. The soil was a sand and clay mixture and easy digging. Each shovelful brought up a few hidden pieces of pottery and a few broken tools. When I reached the needed three feet depth for a really solid post, my shovel brought up a rather large, perfectly curved piece of yellow pottery! Yellow-painted pottery is very rare in this area. A full bowl or olla restored can bring in a hefty price from an eager collector. A few more shovelfuls brought up more pieces of the bowl. I set these aside carefully and fit them loosely together. All the pieces were together. All I needed was the rim pieces of the bowl. My excitement was running high. I held my 3D jigsaw puzzle in my hands thinking that something was odd about this old piece of pottery, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
I tried one last shovelful and my questions were immediately answered. As the soil dropped from the shovel, so did a small human jawbone. With teeth!
A chill traveled up and down my spine, and a cold sweat broke on my forehead. The bowl I had been holding seemed strange because the inside of the bowl had a strange design etched into it. A design very similar to pictures I had seen in my biology books. The design of two halves of a human brain. The bowl was a skull.
The pieces were transferred gently to the bottom of the hole and I quickly filled the hole. I went to the truck, pulled out a metal T-post, pounded it into the ground, attached the wires, and quit for the day. I had a bad case of the heebie-jeebies and felt a shadow pass over me. I had read Stephen King’s Pet Semetary and knew what happened when you messed around with old Indian burial grounds.
From that point on, I stuck with metal T-posts and never, ever, dug in or around an Indian ruin.
Comments
Post a Comment