the hunter gatherer of bones
a dreamtime fable by Anneli Davey
“What were you, once upon a time, bones?…”
The child sat in a dark, damp, deep hole. The thing she feared most: the old wells, grown over with grass. She knew they were there, some where, waiting to swallow her up.
“So, it has finally happened,’ she thought.
She was trapped and couldn’t climb out, although she tried. Her calls for help went unanswered.
One night, after many nights, under the light of a full moon, the shadow of a figure passed above the opening of the well. Before the girl could cry out an Old Woman with mangy hair and fishbones for teeth stood above her.
“Dig down.” The Old Woman commanded.
Down?! She thought. “I will NOT!” spat the frightened child.
The Old Woman sighed a tired sigh, waved her hand in front of the child and watched as the girl fell into a deep sleep. Through her closed eyes, the child watched as the Old Woman reached into the girl’s chest and removed her heart, and placed it in a bag that the Old Woman wore around her neck. The heart thumped, thumped, thumped as the Old Woman wore it, building a fire to keep the child warm.
“Dig down,” the Old Woman whispered again…
In the last days of spring in 1975, when I was 12 years old, I left my junior high school without finishing grade 7 or stopping to clean out my locker. I ditched my books in a back-alley garbage can, and never looked back.
By the summer of the same year, I was sleeping all day and partying all night with a group of junkyard dogs. I experienced my first blackout from drinking too much at age 13. A firmly entrenched runaway, I spent a few months in a home for delinquent girls after being picked up by the police two provinces away.
I found safety and belonging behind the locked iron gates with the Mother Theresas who monitored our units like old statues with moss growing down the deep cracks of their stone faces…
The Hunter Gatherer of Bones is a new and timeless myth about a girl’s journey between worlds— of the seen and unseen, childhood and womanhood, despair and hope— set in the mysterious, fertile underworld of a dreamtime forest.
The myth is whole in itself. But in this performance piece, author and artist Anneli Davey shares it alongside the story of her own girlhood experiences of loss and betrayal, surrender to the frightening unknown, and the triumphant rebirth of joy and trust.
Readings
Dates to be announced soon.
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