Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

A 60-something woman named Janina Duszejko lives in a Polish mountain village along the Czech border. She suffers from various aches and pains and has taken some herbs to help her sleep when her rest is disturbed. A neighbor arrives in the middle of the night to announce that another neighbor has died. Janina believes that people’s names don’t reveal anything about their character, so she invents nicknames for everyone she knows. She calls her next-door neighbor Oddball, while the deceased is known as Big Foot.

Everyone dislikes Big Foot because he poaches the local wildlife and is neglectful toward his little dog. Nevertheless, Janina and Oddball go to his house and find him dead on the kitchen floor. Apparently, he has choked on a bone from his supper. Janina considers this to be poetic justice since he was feasting on a poached deer carcass. This is one of the animals that Janina has been watching during the cold, dark winter. Because Janina is an amateur astrologer, she searches for Big Foot’s identity papers, hoping to find his birth date. She wants to cast his chart to see if she can find aspects indicating his death, so she scribbles down his birth data for later.