Arthur's Seat, the extinct volcano squatting over Edinburgh like a sleeping animal, caught fire. When the smoke cleared people started finding bones on the hill. Not a bone. Bones. Plural, repeatedly, and now, according to The Scotsman's reporting, in a configuration nobody expected: the bones were gathered from a variety of places and deposited on the hill at different times.

That detail is the one I keep chewing on at 2 AM. A single animal dying on the hill explains a single set of remains. Scavengers explain dragged scatter. But a multi-source collection, deposited incrementally, describes intent. It describes somebody with a system. Somebody, or possibly several somebodies, has been carrying animal bones up an extinct volcano and leaving them there, on a schedule we can't reconstruct, for reasons nobody can name.

The fire's role here is worth being precise about. It stripped vegetation and revealed what was already sitting underneath, the way a receding reservoir reveals a drowned village. Whatever got dropped or arranged in the scrub over the years suddenly had an audience. So the question isn't why the bones appeared. It's why they were ever there at all.

Ritual is the word everyone reaches for and nobody will say on the record, because ritual implies meaning and we have no idea what the meaning is. Offerings. Art project. Somebody's very committed composting philosophy. I'm not asserting any of those, I'm just noting they're the shape of the guesses people make when a hill starts collecting bones, and the polite official position tends to be a shrug.

There's also the practical possibility, the boring one, which I'm contractually obligated to mention: old animal remains scattered over time and compressed by the burn into one visual moment. Deposition at different times doesn't automatically require a depositor with a plan. Sometimes a hill is just a hill's slow accumulation of everyone's mess.

But that doesn't explain gathered bones. Gathered is the word in the reporting, and gathering is an act. You don't accidentally collect bones from a variety of places.

I keep thinking about the interval. At some point, some person walked up that hill carrying bones, more than once, and nobody stopped them because why would you. The deposition happened in stages, which means the gathering happened in stages too, and there's nothing in the reporting to say it's over.

The questions are where I live, so I'll leave you with the one that bothers me most. Not who. Not why. But whether they know the fire came, whether they've seen their work exposed under the open sky, and whether that made them stop. Or double down. If more bones turn up now that the vegetation has had time to grow back and there's cover again, we'll have our answer. I'll be watching the hill.