What we want most

Yes, you’re a hunter, like our primitive ancestors. You want the rare, the hard to get. Not from a medical supplier, not a specimen with the cranium cut through and hinged like a calcified Faberge Easter egg. No, the real thing. Even if it has to stay hidden, that’s the one you desire above all. But how to get one, with the law, ethics, custom, all against it? The finding is so much part of it, the whole process, the hunting, the finding, the preparing, the displaying, or squirreling away.

The Rotting Spot

Below, the cover of this fascinating book of skulls, secrets, and lies…
see redsquirrelpress.com?rottingspot for more

a fascinating book with a skull hunting theme!

The unattainable specimen.

A perfect specimen is flung up by a high tide, stranded, sand-logged, a bright-billed puffin, say. Maybe a dolphin, the skin like tight rubber, the saw toothed smile empty now, the body showing the scars of undersea living. Roadkill, a delicate red squirrel, aflame on the tarmac, or an unusual bird blown off course by winter gales, to blunder under the wheels of human indifference. Either way, whoever is watching and disapproving of your activities. Whether you’re sawing away with an old kitchen knife, or you’re lucky enough to have surgical steel, you are a true hunter. You don’t just want this head, you’ve got to have it, got to make it yours, and you do, you sever the head and manoeuvre it, beetles dropping like paratroopers, or fresh blood like brown jelly oozing, into a plastic bag, and then you run. To the rotting spot.

The rotting spot, where head becomes bone.

And all true skull hunters know, what it is we desire above all other specimens. The human skull. The unattainable, unless you buy it from a medical supplier. Not real collecting, that though is it? It’s the finding, the discovery, that’s part of the whole experience. Ethics, the law, mean you don’t find human skulls lying around, and just take them home to keep, to show them off on your shelves. Even very old ones.

After you find your specimen…

It’s not easy cutting off a head: sliding the blade between the cervical vertebrae, sly and slick as a credit card springing a lock. It might be a fresh kill, plump and juicy, the sinews stretchy and strong. Or it might be an old, seasoned corpse, the squatters moved in. Maggots. Those fast black spiders. Beetles, wandering through the delicate arches of bone like tourists through a cathedral. The eyes already gone. Sight and thought, first signs of life to go; eyes and brain, first parts cherry-picked by scavengers. Hell, a crow would take your living eyes, if it was sure you couldn’t move. You know the way crows look at you? Now you know what they’re thinking. But you’re a hunter, you’ve got to have that skull, even with the stench, the flies, and those sinews dried to flat dark ropes still stubbornly holding out.

No, it’s not easy, cutting off a head.