quarry

An open excavation from which stone, slate, sand, or gravel is extracted — a wound in the landscape, sometimes hundreds of feet deep, its walls showing the strata that took millions of years to deposit. Abandoned quarries become swimming holes, wildlife refuges, and accidental lakes. The word also means the animal being hunted — the prey pursued by hawk or hound — from an entirely different root, but the convergence is apt: both meanings involve pursuit and extraction.