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Big Bone Lick
- The University Press of Kentucky
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86 Big Bone Lick I. Following a buffalo road I come to a big lick where all the ground is widely padded down by great mumbling herds. Here also the delicate prints of careful deer and there the broader hooves of elk, one at a gallop, dewclaws extended. And circling at the edge, the straight tracks of hunting brush wolves, the stalking pads of panthers. But here also a mystery, the great bones of elephants, monstrous thighs and tusks protruding from the mud, and one huge skull, its crown gleaming from the earth like pale limestone. Savages, too, have marked the place with cuts and signs. 87 Some within this lifetime were made by Shawnee in old wounds on oaks and beeches, but those on rocks are older than memory. A dull black circle with forms I cannot cipher, and the red figure of a cat standing like a man with human hands upraised to threaten or to tear and rend. I feel the earth and the rocks throbbing with past life, the lick teeming with milling herds spooked by slowly moving hunters, some on four feet, some on two, the dance always the same. The hunter takes the prey and they move on, then, one day they’re gone. Now I wait in a locust grove. Rifle ready, I look to where they’ll come. [54.198.108.174] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:41 GMT) 88 II. The hunters hide on the far side of the mud. They wear skins against the cold and hold fluted harpoons cradled on their throwing sticks. One, dressed in the skin of a long-toothed cat, stalks slowly from the other side. The mammoths mill about uneasily. Suddenly the cat-man springs up with a grating howl. The big animals knock against each other. Then the rout begins. One is slowed by the mud. The hunters rise and throw. ...