The jawbone of a beaver?

You never know what you might find on the trail. We pulled onto a dirt road (early in the trip, when we had the Pilot) and pulled over at the top of a hill. We were in Montana, and we wanted to take a long view of the surrounding countryside. As the kids and Don wandered off, Paul found a skeleton and called me over. This skeleton, the first of two we found, was hard to identify...especially because I was not expecting, in this dry country, up on a hilltop, to find the remains of a beaver. Paul was so excited to have found such treasure.

Meanwhile, a few yards off, Don and the middle kids were puzzling over a second find. The second was easier to identify, but even more mysteriously out of place...it was a large snapping turtle skeleton. Worse, the snapper had an i.d. tag. Both skeletons were bleached by the sun, but neither was old or dirty, and the i.d. tag made us really wonder what had happened on that hillside. In the end, we decided not to contact the owner, figuring that if his pet had gone missing that he might prefer to imagine it swimming and free rather than ripped open and dead on a deserted hilltop. Paul took the jawbone of the beaver as a souvenir, and we drove off, feeling a bit uncomfortable about what we had seen.