The bones of exile

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I remember I stopped dead in my tracks. I had been walking along the flat, dark shale bed of the ravine behind my grandfather’s farmhouse in southern Indiana. There on the ground, still in perfect alignment, lay the skeleton of a cow that had wandered away one winter many years ago and had slipped and fallen into the ravine. The bones lay in precise order—the head bone connected to the neck bone, the neck bone connected to the back bone, and so on.

All the cow skeleton seemed to need was a breath of life, and all its bones would rise up and scamper back up the side of the ravine, back home to the paddock for fresh water and hay, back to the company of the herd.