Place of Sacrifice

There is a story I keep meaning to tell, yet keep forgetting to tell. This night, it comes to me again, as I sip catnip and chamomile tea.

I was very young, though old enough to go with my mother and father on hikes within our mountains. The Appalachian Mountains of Western North Carolina, home to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians for centuries untold, where dense forests and rock formations as old as the Precambrian and early Paleozoic still cast their shadows.

I wish that I had remembered to ask my father where we were hiking before he died. We were deep into the woods. I don't remember a trail. I was too young to even remember my parents reaction to what we came upon. I think I was the only one to approach it, to walk within it. I perhaps had come upon it myself, straying off from my parents and the trail. 

 

 

I had come to a small cleared place in the dark wood. It was rectangular and perhaps 8x10, the size of an average room. Within the space the forest floor had been covered with bone. The ground crunched as I walked upon it, my eyes wide. The trees around the space all had various animal skulls nailed to them. I remember looking at what I guessed was a dog skull nailed to a tree. I remember thinking of the pain of all these animals. The fear.

All these years later, I still wonder, what in the fuck did I stumble into? I never spoke about it with my parents that I remember.