Today I was on my FB page looking for some pictures to use on my blog and out of curiosity I visited some of my friends pages .
I was treated to pictures flowers and sunshine and green grass and blue skies. My news feed was brimming with pastel charm.
Then I thought to myself- hey I should post a picture of my Spring Day too!
But I couldn’t because the moment I could have captured and shared was gone.
This morning I was on my loading dock and there were two crows sitting on top of the fence near the railroad tracks.
From what I understand they like to dive at people, I’m guessing that’s why the homeless people who used to hang around my loading dock have been absent. Anyway, when I am out there all they do is preen and talk
This morning was different.
The moment I stepped out onto the dock they sort of- I don’t know raged is the word that best describes how they sounded.
I looked around to see what had them so upset- nothing was there.
Then I Iooked down and I saw two dead rats.
I’m guessing they had eaten some of the poison from the traps that the building over from mine put out for them.
I went in and got a shovel and a hefty bag and I put them inside of it and then I called to have them taken away. You can’t leave them out you know, and if you don’t dispose of them properly other animals can eat them and meet the same fate.
I HATE poison traps. It’s the death trap that keeps on giving.
When the rats were gone, the crows settled down and when I went out there at the end of the day they chatted at me like always and then they flew off.
So that was how my Sunny Spring Morning went. It wasn’t Facebook material but I guess it matters just as much. I suppose I could share my moment there- even if it wasn’t dripping with pastels. It was dripping with life and death.
Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tightly over its bones. With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash-gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody … Unclean and suffering from suppuration of the flesh, the Wendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption-Basil H. Johnston, an Ojibwe teacher and scholar from Ontario, gives a description of a wendigo:
It was a stunning archeological discovery. Found in a pit dated from the early 1600’s ( The Starving Time ) mixed with the bones of squirrels and dogs, were the cannibalized remains of a 14 year old girl.
The people who reconstructed her face named her ” Jane “.
Forensic facial reconstruction of the young girl thought to have been cannibalized. It appears she was dead at the time. (Donald E. Hurlbert/Smithsonian)
I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid in school studying ” American History ” we never got to the part of the story where the the starving Jamestown colonists disinterred their dead and then butchered them for food.
It sounds like a scene from a horror film.
However, I don’t think that anyone was digging up graves by moonlight with a shovel. From what I understand, it was freezing and snowing so I’m not sure how many people were actually buried underground. Still, the idea that a few Jamestown Colonialists went into a makeshift morgue in the dead of winter and chose which bodies would be pulled from their place of rest and taken to a place where I’m guessing that animals were slaughtered and butchered, is a horror that I can’t quite wrap my mind around.
I mean, I get it, I just can’t see it.
Forensics tell us that before she and her fellow Jamestown Settlers began to starve that Jane was well nourished, he teeth were white and beautiful and her bones would have told you she wasn’t a laborer and that her spine and joints probably showed that she wasn’t doing heavy lifting. She was a child of means. I’ll bet she could read and write too.
It’s what happened to her in death that separated her not only from the class she had been born into, but the way the dead are treated by tradition.
Jane’s skull had been cracked open, some of the cuts to her jaw were describe as ‘tentative’ but I’m thinking that someone couldn’t bring themselves to butcher her remains, so they tried to carve her up carefully and then at some point they stopped caring because they simple had to not care in order to do what needed to be done.
There’s something sad about that. Call me sentimental ( or just mental ) but she may have saved some people from starving to death. The way they treated her poor remains doesn’t show much gratitude. They could have given what remained of her a burial. They owed her that.
In my mind’s eye, if the Wendigo touched the colonists, I don’t think it happened when they went into the place where the dead were sleeping. I doubt if it cursed them when they cooked Jane and probably a few other people too.
I think it touched them when they threw Jane’s bones into the garbage pit.
That was evil and that is what the Wendigo really feeds on.
Detail of cut marks found on the girl’s jaw, or lower mandible in a stereo-microscopic photo. Smithsonian Institution / Don Hurlbert
Four butchery marks found on the skull of a 14-year-old girl who died at Jamestown constitute the first evidence for cannibalism during the colonization of the New World.
(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
The Smithsonian Institution’s Doug Owsley displays the skull and facial reconstruction of “Jane of Jamestown” at the museum in Washington on Wednesday.Carolyn Kaster/STF
When you give the finger to the Justice system, sometimes it slams you in cuffs and you get to take a ‘perp walk’ down a well lit hallway in handcuffs lined with the press.
AND sometimes people play the video of you doing the walk over and over again because it makes you feel all warm and happy inside.
But this is about slang- was Stevie being frogmarched or was he taking perp walk. Which would be the correct term to use?
In this case I’d call this a straight up frogmarch-because ol’ Steve is hopping mad- lol.
