Souvenirs Of Rural Life

By Emil van der Poorten -April 6, 2014 

Emil van der Poorten

It is essential that the picture that accompanies the text of this column is published and I expect It will.  Otherwise, I’m sure the text will not see the light of day and legitimately so!

For the uninitiated, the picture appearing here, not deliberately “gussied-up” by fallen yellow Tabebuia flowers by the way,  is of what, appears to be the front leg of a bovine.  Judging by the size of the limb, the animal had to have been a largish calf.

That this was only recently severed from the animal which it adorned until only recently was evident from the lack of anything resembling putrefaction of the meat under the skin and the fact that the hair on that skin was not in the process of being shed. Finding something like this in one’s front yard could be considered unusual even in rural Sri Lanka in the 21^st Century except under the most ghoulish of conditions.

A safe guess would be that our “rice hound” of indeterminate parentage but unusual intelligence had found this somewhere in the neighbourhood and brought it home for display as some kind of a prize as she is often wont to do.  But then, you don’t find calf limbs lying around our neighbourhood or most neighbourhoods for that matter.  Someone or some animal had brought it within reach of our dog which doesn’t stray too far from home base at any time.  The guess was that it was a member of the several packs of feral dogs that had brought it within our dog’s reach.  The next question is, “Where would a feral dog (or dogs) find such an object to begin with, starting this strange relay?”  We have very few cattle anywhere near us and none within a couple of miles and, in any case, cattle don’t go around shedding their limbs!  And inquiries from those known to have a cow or calf in our neck of the woods drew a blank in the matter of a lost calf, leave alone one that had been slaughtered. The most reasonable explanation for the presence of the bovine limb in our yard went as follows:

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