76 Nebraskaland • May 2026
Tree Skull
By Eric Fowler
The Last Stop
Things live in the forest and die in the forest. That's just
the way nature works.
Those things include white-tailed deer and trees.
Sometimes they live and die together in very interesting ways.
I spent a lot of time in the woods at Indian Cave State
Park between 2017 and 2019 setting and checking camera
traps that six times successfully captured photographs
of a mountain lion that had decided to call the park and
surrounding land along the Missouri River home.
One day, while looking for a new place to put a camera trap,
I stumbled on life and death interacting: A pawpaw sapling
had grown up through the eye socket of a white-tailed deer
skull, lifting it 4 feet off the ground. I revisited the tree skull
the next spring and captured the image you see here.
I had intended to return from time to time and see how
high the skull would be lifted from the floor. But there are
only so many hours in the day, and after moving my camera
trap to a different part of the park, I didn't take the time to
revisit the spot until recently.
On that visit, there were a few pawpaws growing in the
draw that were 3 to 4 inches in diameter. At least one more
had been crushed by a fallen tree. The skull was nowhere
to be found. I'm not sure when, but I'm guessing after a few
years, the diameter of the tree exceeded the size of the eye
socket and broke the bone, which would've been very brittle
after years of exposure to the elements.
I would've rather seen the bark grow around the bones, and
the skull now 10 feet above the forest floor. But on the floor
is surely where it ended up. There, it might have fed mice or
other small mammals, which might have fed larger ones. Or
it simply melted back into the soil, providing nutrients for
the pawpaw and other plants.
Either way, the circle of life in the forest continues.
