If you wander around in the river and on it’s islands long enough you can’t help but find all kinds of things.
On a couple of Fox River islands are a couple of abandoned, dilapidated hunting cottages. Someone used to like to hunt in style, all the comforts of home in a nice compact space. A small bedroom, a small kitchen and living area and just enough of a bathroom to keep from having to go crap out in the woods all the time. Near one of them is an abandoned car from the 1930’s. Near the other is the spread out remains of a pick up truck that has to date back to the 1920’s.
Floods seem to bring all kinds of things down the river. In one stretch there’s a mattress wrapped around a big boulder. On a nearby island are a refrigerator, stove, washing machine and a few metal kitchen cabinets.
One of the main reasons I go wandering around out there is for the wildlife. Eventually they die off and I find them. I used to have a rather large collection of skulls and bones laying around my garage. Eventually they started to creep me out so they had to go.
The most common thing to find is deer, followed closely by beaver. But my collection was also made up of bones from turkey, red tailed hawks, herons, turtle shells, muskrat, a carp skull and a wide variety of bones that went unidentified.
While out wandering down the river recently I came across a skull laying in the river near shore, because of it’s length I immediately assumed it was a deer.
Something seemed different though. When I picked it up the teeth were definitely not that of a deer, unless it’s one of those rare carnivore deer. There were holes in the skull where the two main teeth should have been. Considering that all of the other teeth were pretty much still in place, I wondered if they had been intentionally pulled out.
I assumed this was either a dog or a coyote. A coyote wouldn’t be out of the question. I hear them howling up and down the river all the time, especially when emergency vehicles go by or they’re testing the sirens at 10 AM on a Tuesday. Above me at the top of the steep bluff ran railroad tracks, the same tracks that run near my house almost 5 miles away. A perfect highway for anything that want’s to get from one area to another with almost no chance of being seen.
And then I noticed the hole. Someone had put a bullet in the head of whatever this was.
Someone definitely had it out for this canine. I turned the skull around in my hands and found the exit wound. More like a good sized hole.
Whoever did this was pretty much looking this thing right in the face when they pulled the trigger. You would think if they were that close it would already be dead. This must have been the kill shot on something that was wounded.
In a rare moment I actually looked up what I had found when I got home. It’s definitely a coyote skull. Based on where I found this I can’t imagine that it had washed down the river. The area was far too protected from the current and only a couple of feet from shore.
Beyond the railroad tracks at the top of the bluff is a farm. There’s an area that has been cleared and a deer stand sits in a tree along the clearing. The logic of wounding a coyote while deer hunting, getting down and administering a kill shot, removing the two big teeth and then tossing the whole thing down the bluff made the most sense.
Not sure I would do that. I don’t have a problem with coyotes. I hear they’re a nuisance in some suburban subdivisions, but I don’t live near those. Around me they seem to keep a balance. Fewer bunnies around to devastate my garden. We don’t have skunks even though we live on the edge of the woods. I can live with that.
Maybe some of the neighborhood dogs will start to disappear. Some dog owners just let them out their door. One seems to have taken a liking to shitting on my front lawn. Not sure I would intervene on behalf of the dog if I walked out one morning onto my lawn and the coyote was tearing it to shreds. Would serve my neighbor right.
I’ve decided to start my skull and bone collection up again. This one was too good to pass up. If my neighbors don’t learn to behave neighborly, I may be adding a chihuahua, a beagle and a couple of mutts to the collection relatively soon.
Now I just have to figure out how to get the coyotes to come cruising through the neighborhood.