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.

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