NONFICTION

Fragments of Bone, Fragments of Light

By Nell Smith     VOLUME 57 No. 3

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In the open shortgrass prairie just east of Casper, Wyoming, Little Box Elder Creek slides down through the foothills of the Laramie Mountains. Willow, boxelder, and cottonwood trees shade the water as it carves a small canyon into the light Mississippian sandstone. In a steep bank along this canyon, tucked amidst mountain mahogany and sagebrush, is the entrance to a cave. Years of erosion formed the cave, either by the creek sawing at its side or by the dissolution of the soft elements of the rock. From the inside out, the stone melted away downstream, and into this absence grew a space the size of a four-bedroom house.

Just inside the entrance, pellets of bone and fur accumulate below the roosts of great horned owls. Coyotes have taken up residence on the ground. Deeper in, their pups play atop over three meters of sediment and fossil bone—remains of the thousands of animals that came before them.



I first went to Wyoming to be within the band of totality of the 2017 solar eclipse with Parker and his friend James. On the long drive north from Arizona, we saw no sign of the traffic that we had been prepared for. I spent most of the drive watching the landscape shift and blur, hardly thinking about the event we were going to see. Really, it was James’s trip. He had been anticipating and planning it for months. I was only along for the ride because he had invited Parker. He and Parker had been friends for years, first connecting in the music scene, then later on trips spent exploring remote areas of the state they’d both grown up in. In comparison, James and I orbited each other through mutual friends. I had first met him several years prior through a best friend from college. She and I had a bitter falling out, so when James turned up in my life again through Parker, I worried whether his perspective of me might be colored by the broken friendship at our first point of connection. This was still in the back of my mind when I joined them to see the eclipse.

I had decided to go at the last minute. I had no preconceptions about how being within the seventy-mile-wide belt of totality might be any different from back home where the eclipse would be partially visible. I even felt a little haughty at the prospect of the eclipse. I’d experienced vastness before. I’d seen lunar eclipses and watched the moon go red. How much different could it be? Later, I read Annie Dillard’s essay in which she states that a “partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.” But on that drive, I thought of the immensity I’d often felt from the Atlantic spooling out to an unbroken horizon and thought how I already knew something about insignificance.



One proximal left humerus of a killdeer. One premaxilla from a western meadowlark. The mandible of a horned lark. The tip of a pine siskin beak.

These were some of the remnants of individual birds that lived and died near Little Box Elder Cave. Between 1949 and 1963, paleontologists excavated more than fifteen thousand bones from the site, some dating back to over eleven thousand years ago. Most of the bones were from mammals as is typical of the fossil record. Evolved for flight, bird bones contain a honeycomb of air pockets that break apart and erode into sediment. But here, scattered amongst the bones of shrew, bat, lion, panther, pika, the late noble marten and short-faced bear, they recorded the bones of over one thousand birds representing over seventy different species. Almost no other site in the Rocky Mountain West has offered such a diverse look into the past world of birds.

The bone structure of modern birds began amongst dinosaurs in the Jurassic period. Approximately sixty-six million years ago, a primitive waterbird we call Presbyornis may have cocked its head above shallow, muddy water as the asteroid hit, which would set off the K–Pg extinction. Across all taxa of plants and animals, entire orders of living beings that had formed and persisted over millions of years of tumult suddenly blinked out. Almost three-quarters of life on Earth would not survive. Yet into these new absences emerged the creatures that remained. Tiny mammals sniffed at the carcasses of burnt trees and uncovered worms. Protected at the bottom of streams, a few surviving snails grazed the detritus that slowly fell from above. Eventually, ancestral birds took off into the darkened, ashy skies and began to diversify.



Early in the morning on August twenty-first, we hiked to the top of a jagged ridge on BLM land just outside of town. We had joined Noelle and Nick, the couple we were staying with in Casper, and our group of three melded into five. Parker and Noelle had been friends since college, a friendship I knew was dotted with periods in which they had been romantically involved. Parker and I had not yet been together a year at that point, and though we’d already lived and worked together out of tents, boats, and field stations, I felt the presence of their years stacked against my own. But I was trying not to give this insecurity any light—I wanted them to have the space I felt old friends deserve.

I walked the top of the ridge and watched red-breasted nuthatches and mountain chickadees flit amongst the pinyon pines that seemed to grow straight from the rock. Later, I would read that this rock was composed of sediments that accumulated slowly in a submarine environment and which, over time, were compressed into sandstone and shale—rock so hard and resistant to change that everything around it was worn away. Huge chunks of rock like this were thrust out of place when the mountains we now call the Wind Rivers, Uintas, Bighorns, Medicine Bows, and Laramie Mountains rose and began stretching their limbs. This ridge had once laid flat against the earth. Now, it jutted up from the expansive prairie like the backbone of a fish. Surrounding the ridge, grass twisted up into cowlicks from the wind. In the distance, pump jacks seesawed in the sagebrush, drawing up oil that had been deposited from roughly the time that this area had tilted, folded, and faulted. Standing on the knife-edge of the ridge, I remembered an earthquake I’d experienced that unsettled how much I took for granted about the state of the earth. Now, the ridge offered similar proof that, given enough time, mountains can move. The earth can spring up.



Fourteen bones from a pair of mallards. Five femora from rough-legged hawks. The shoulder bone of a Canada goose. One mandible from a gyrfalcon.

On the surface, most of the bones from Little Box Elder Cave are from birds still present in Wyoming, or at least ones that lived here in human memory. But reaching down and deeper into the cave, the bones scatter back through time. There are birds in these deeper layers that lived before we were here to name them: the upper leg bone of Neophrontops, an extinct genus of vulture we only know from its fossils or, in the center of the cave, the complete eyelet of wing bone belonging to a tiny Pleistocene teal that did not survive to see humans fish its waters.

At about a mile above current sea level, Little Box Elder Creek is far from the waters that used to flood this area. A great inland sea covered this place, stretching from the Gulf Coast to the Arctic Ocean until about seventy million years ago when mountains began rumbling under the waters. Tectonic plates slid off kilter. Over the next thirty million years, the Rocky Mountains rose, shedding water to the north and south, and began creeping out across the plains. They settled briefly, and debris began to erode from highlands, filling the low basins. Subduct and fold. Uplift and erode. Shift and spew and settle. From Nevada and Utah, volcanic ash blew east, coloring parts of Wyoming like snow.

Aside from a dammed reservoir, no marshes or ponds are present near the cave today, so we can read the number of waterbirds and shorebirds found in the cave as vestiges of its geologic history. There is a way here to understand the whole from the parts. The ordering of things matters. Fragments of carbon can be identified as bone. Bones recognized as animals, as birds. These can then be compared to the bones of species living today, and names emerge. Names link to behavior, diet, distribution, habitat. Where bones fall above and below each other, the depth and qualities of soil: these can be seen like layers of a book opening to reveal entire ancient ecosystems. Steppes, lakes, forests. Echoes of the whole panorama fall into place.



I once had a teacher roll out a fifty-meter tape, marking the eras from Precambrian to Mesozoic to Cenozoic, saying that each meter represented ten million years. He wanted a tangible way for us to consider our place in time. One by one, my classmates and I began lining up along this time line, our bodies representing the appearance of multicellular organisms, the first flowering plants, the five mass extinctions, the first early humans. As we tried filling in events from human history, our bodies couldn’t compress tight enough to mimic time. Everything I thought I knew about the world could no longer fit on my little toe.

Time had once felt impenetrable and boundless, but now it was only defined in terms I could not access. The world I had imagined as inanimate was coming into animation—rock and plant in constant motion, each species of animal living along its own vivid timescale. And while I had always struggled with the idea of death, I now found myself wondering why I had only been troubled by this future I would not witness—and not everything in the past that I had already missed.

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TO READ MORE FROM THIS ESSAY, PICK UP A COPY OF VOL 57 No. 3




Originally from Maine, NELL SMITH is an interdisciplinary writer based in the Southwest. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Electric Literature, Southeast Review, KHÔRA, Camas, The Offing, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in creative writing and environment & natural resources from the University of Wyoming.


VOLUME 57 No. 3