Mason
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
At first I thought it was plastic trash, like an old grocery bag.
Then I realized it was bone.
It wasn't a whole skeleton, just a cluster of parts.
A rib cage.
Something that could have been a deer pelvis.
And a skull turned sideways in the mud.
It wasn't clean.
It wasn't arranged in a neat hunter-left-a-carcass way.
It looked like something had dragged it there and left it.
The skull had no antlers.
The eye sockets were full of dark water.
There was moss starting to grow on the edges.
Mason came up beside me and said quietly, Don't touch anything.
I wasn't going to.
He kept looking at the bones, and then he lifted his eyes and scanned the trees with that same stiff movement.
We walked until we found the next camp.
It was another designated site, smaller, tighter, with less flat ground.
The fire ring looked like it hadn't been used in a long time.
There were no fresh footprints, no recent trash.
Still, it felt wrong to stop there, but it was late, and we were where we planned to be.