Ft. McPherson Journal - Part Three

The other day I was speaking with Sarah, an employee at the store as she was putting out toys. The toys were action figure that included men in fluorescent furs, space-aged snowmobiles, and wooly mammoths. Sarah motioned towards the toy wooly mammoth and told me her father had once found "a...a...whatchacallit....mammoth trunk" up in the mountains. She was pointing to the toy's nose and tusks.

"You mean the tusk? The bone?"

"No. It was the trunk. It was dried out."

She held up her hands about thee feet apart to indicate the size.

I can only assume that it was freeze dried somehow. She said it didn't stink at all and that someone in the family might still have it. She also told me that her father and some others once came across "a whole bunch" of mammoths when they were snowmobiling in the mountains but that "they never went back to that place." Her father is long gone.

Sarah is a wealth of interesting and sometimes disturbing stores. The other day I got off the phone with an elder from town while Sarah was in the office with me, doing some paperwork.

"Who was that?" she asked.

"Oh it was so and so (I don't remember the name) and she's sending her grandson up to charge on her account."

"She doesn't really come around any more, ever since she got shot."

"Shot?"

"Yeah, her brother-in-law. He shot her and four other people in the family."

"Jesus! Was he drunk or what?"

"No. They say when they found him he was still holding the gun and he just kept saying 'why do they always make fun of me? Why do they always make fun of me' over and over again."