Jobs #2 A Bag of Stakes

Putrefaction* is never a pleasant experience. Sometimes its overwhelming. I've had some of my strangest encounters with death while land surveying. One of my very first jobs was working for the Tooele County Surveyor, Joe Ubanick, (sp?). On one particular occasion, we were working in the rural farming community of Erda, running centerline stationing down Erda Lane. We were dragging a 100' metal chain, (the days before lasers and EDMs) and setting points @ cl every hundred feet. It was early in the morning, and as usual, there wasn't any traffic on the road. Any other day, this job would have been simple, however on this particular occasion, something terrible had taken place under the veil of darkness. We had arrived at twilight** to get an early jump on the heat. It was going to be a scorcher, and could get as hot as 100 degrees. As the road became illuminated with first light, I beheld hundreds of dead bunnies*** strewn across the road, as far as I could see. I was pretty young, and it really grossed me out. I stood dumbfounded, attempting to understand the situation and put things into perspective. I couldn't imagine why so many bunnies were dead. Who did it? How did they do it? What could inspire such destruction. Two things were clear, these bunnies weren't road kill, and they didn't all drink poison Kool-aid and lay down on the road to die en mass, ala Jim Jones and the People's Temple. As the day dragged on, the heat increased and the only clouds were swarms of flies basking in the fuzzy rotting corpses. It was less than fun dragging the chain across the bodies of decaying animals, and I never did find out where all the dead bunnies came from.

* You've never seen that word at the beginning of a blog before.
** The best time to kill vampires. I have a bag of stakes, and I know how to use them.
** Dead bunnies scattered on dawn's roadway bleeding...