Even the dead come back and get into the paper. Sometimes even a pile of bones, out in the wilderness, in the middle of nowhere, down a ravine.
Front-page headlines in the west coast locals, then some page threes, below the fold, in the state and nationals. A Brazilian couple on a hiking holiday stumbled upon them. Partial skull, teeth, some vertebrae, femur, scapula, pelvis, broken ribs and phalanges scattered about—whatever hadn’t been jawed away. Black and grey bones, mossed and soft, rainforest mulch.
‘They’ve been recovered and will be sent in for DNA testing,’ the sergeant from the Strahan police station was quoted as saying.
‘But yeah, they’ve been there for a long time so we haven’t got much to go on. Nothing much at all, really.’
There was a shovel there too, just nearby, the blade rusted through and the metal faking, the handle detached, a spongy, ruined wood sunk into the damp, composted ground. Made them think it was an old prospector, most likely; just an unfortunate accident, the poor bastard falling into the ravine from a logging track on the upper escarpment, who knew when.
‘Nobody’s come forward,’ the sergeant said. ‘So . . .’ That was the problem.
Could be anyone in the last fifty years, in the last hundred. Silent men had come and gone in those black-and-white days, alone with their packs and prayers, determined to strike golden sparks with their picks, unearth nuggets the size of kittens.
The reporters went home. The Brazilians still had a week of their holiday left…
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