rifle gap

Once upon a mountain I found myself traveling once again through Colorado, on my way home, I suppose, from Denver or Boulder, or perhaps on my way back to Boulder from Glenwood Canyon. I was with a group of friends, It was late and we were tired. We found a dirt road and pulled off the interstate, following the rutted tracks a ways towards the hills, through the brush. It was a strange place, you could just sense it.

The night was dark, and we could see very little save the ground just in front the car. We pulled into a make-shift turn around, the kind you find all over the desert, all over BLM land, and parked the car to camp.

As we unpacked our tents we examined the ground, embedded with shot gun shells, bones and brown glass: the remnants of what were likely whole beer bottles at some point, until they were used for target practice. The ground was a frightening mosaic of death. Whose bones were they, anyway?

I slept only lightly, fading in and out of disturbing dreams about unidentified animals and hunters and, well, being hunted. The morning was welcome, the light washing away the shadows of the night, but the sight wasn't much more pleasant than it had been in my dreams.

It wasn't just the road that painted a picture of the goings-on on this land, it was everything. There were fire pits and beer bottles and shells and bullets, decaying carcasses and bones. Curious, and feeling safe now that the darkness had gone, and with it the fear of predators ( mostly of the Homo sapien type) lurking in the shadows, I went to explore.

The bones were not just deer and elk, no, I found the unmistakable remains of a very large dog. This was no coyote, it was no fox. It was a domestic dog with a head the size of a basketball, okay, probably more like a large ugly-fruit. The find catalyzed an entire series of questions in my head: why would you kill a dog? why here? Whose dog was it? what did it do? who did it eat before it met its end?