It must have been a slow day...

... at the sheriff's office yesterday.

I think every deputy and sheriff in the county spent the afternoon out behind our back pasture fence.

They walked around... discussing and gesturing... hung yellow crime scene tape, and took pictures of my neighbor's barn and the areas behind and to the side of it.

They stood around with clipboards, writing on papers that fluttered in the breeze.

They called the coroner, who showed up in a big black SUV with darkly tinted windows.

The neighbor's back pasture looked like an overflow lot for the county... filled with marked and unmarked county cars.

Once the coroner got there, they all stood around some more... writing on their clipboarded papers, leaning on the hoods of their cars, and sometimes wandering over to the fence to watch my neighbor's horse eat.

I could see my neighbor from time to time... which was a relief with the coroner's car sitting out there.

They never called an ambulance, and judging from the lack of urgency (and the coroner's car) I guessed that whatever was behind the neighbor's barn was already dead.

After several hours of doing whatever they were doing, they rolled up the yellow police tape, and one by one all the cars drove out of my neighbor's pasture and left to do whatever deputies and sheriffs do on sunny Saturday afternoons when they aren't in my neighbor's pasture.

After they left, I saw my neighbor outside and walked back to the back pasture fence to make sure she was ok, and find out what had happened.

Here's what she told me...

Her husband had been doing some fencing work and had been digging a post-hole by the barn, when he dug up a large bone. He thought it was probably a deer until he dug up what looked like a knuckle bone...

That's when they decided to play it safe and call the sheriff's office.

The county deputies came and dug a little more and found a rib cage... and it looked human.

That's when the deputies called the coroner...

...and my neighbor and her husband were asked to wait in the house.

Before long, someone came and started questioning them about how long they'd owned the house, who had owned the house before them, how could they contact those people, etc.  When it was time to feed her horse, my neighbor had to be escorted by a deputy as she got the hay from the barn and carried it out to feed.

As the afternoon passed, the neighbors continued to wait at the house while the deputies, sheriff, coroner, and everyone else who was out there (about 15 people by that time) leaned on their cars, wrote on their fluttering papers, and took turns digging ever so carefully to reveal more bones.

After hours of picture taking, digging, discussing, and leaning on cars, someone finally dug down far enough to find the skull...

... of a very large dog.

With that the crime scene tape was wrapped up, everyone wrote a little more on their fluttering papers, and they all left.

My neighbor was a very good sport about the whole thing, but her husband was a little cranky about the wasted afternoon.

The only thing he was happy about is that the deputies had finished digging the hole he'd started...

... and they'd taken all the bones they'd found with them. :)