By Barbara Jorgen Nance
Bones are silent story tellers. I've been a bone collector most of my life. I look at a bone and images show up like strangers in a dream. The first bone in my collection was a quail's wishbone that my Dad gave me. As kids we flushed out birds in the fall fields for my parents to shoot. Then we kids were the feather pluckers at the end of the day. I never gave the bones much thought until one eve back in LA my Dad gave me a small white box that held a quail's wishbone laid on a bed of cotton. It seemed like a special, secret gift, so I didn't share it with anyone. This was the beginning of my interest in bone collecting. I've looked at bones ever since that time with both curiosity and appreciation.
Monkey Skull: True Story. In the early 70s, my husband Sherwood and I lived on the Santa Susana Pass overlooking the train tracks that meandered through Simi Valley, Calif. We rented a tiny house built around a train caboose. We shared a large piece of ranch property with two other houses. One morning we were walking around the property and came upon a dead animal lying face down in the tall grass. We noticed it had hands and fingers. Sherwood turned it over with his boot to reveal a monkey. We called Animal Control. We were concerned that our dogs might have killed it. Was it someone's pet? When Animal Control arrived he advised us that it was a wanted monkey belonging to some animal trainers for the movies. The monkey had escaped and had been viciously attacking children around the local park. There had been some severe injuries. He was to be shot and killed on sight.
My silly husband asked for the monkey's head. I was shocked to see the officer cut off the head and hand it to him. Sherwood stuck it in my hanging planter. Over time, skin and muscle dried up and disintegrated, leaving the skull barring his teeth and staring at us through his giant, empty eye sockets! I got used to him after awhile and began to view the skull with curiosity and appreciation.
Some 40 plus years later, the monkey skull is still with us. He's moved to several different areas around California and ultimately arrived with us here in New Mexico. Somewhere along the way he lost his bottom jaw. That will remain another mystery.
I've been a bone collector my entire life ever since my Dad gave me that tiny quail's wishbone. There's no shortage of bones around our property these days. I keep collecting them. My dogs steal them, move them around to new locations, chew on some and proudly return them to us. My curiosity and appreciation for bones seems to be never ending. They continue to be silent storytellers.