Finally Jodie asked my father to take him into this big hole in the ground. We didn't think it safe to take such a small child into the cave, but Jodie kept insisting.
However, Jodie won out. One day his grandfather led him to the cave entrance, the one where visitors now enter, and took him inside. From that day on we were besieged with all kinds of childish questions.
The incident is worth mentioning because, as far as I know, Jodie was the first child ever to enter the Big Cave.
We never did see any forms of life in the cave, other than the millions of bats which made it their home, but on one of our trips into the inner chambers the boys found a large bone. They brought it out to examine it more carefully. It was much too large to be a human bone, and when the boys tried to break it they found it was very hard, resisting for a while the blows of their sledge hammer.
The bone apparently was in a state of semi-petrification. We all speculated as to how it could have gotten into the cave, and every man had his own theory. Some said an animal must have fallen into the cave, such as Mr. Simm's cow had done, but lived to stumble on into the cave where he starved to death.
The fellows thought this theory unlikely because if it were true, other bones would have been found at the same spot.
Another theory was that a cave man centuries ago had killed some wild beast and had taken a leg of meat into the cave where he made his home. Meat and man had long since ceased to exist, but the bone remained.
At least we couldn't offer any sound reason against this theory, but it seemed almost fantastic to accept it.
The only other theory which seemed at all plausible was that some wild animal, such as a bobcat or lynx, had at some time lived in the cave and had brought in the leg of a deer or moose and left it there after having eaten the meat from it. However, there were no tracks of any kind in the Big Cave, hence that theory had little support.
How the bone got there still remains a mystery.