Accidental animal parts

Normal people collect flowers, rocks. But we’re not all normal, are we.

I once knew a cat that collected leaves instead of dead mice, mewing at the front door until someone would acknowledge the beautiful green catch between his paws and add it to the bowl filled with similar leafy trophies. People collect strange things too. I used to visit the fascinating home of an elderly aunt in Scotland. She was a tiny woman. The low ceiling and dark interior of her home seemed fitting to her diminutive posture, shrinking the world down around her. I almost felt the need to stoop. Her tiny frame was further dwarfed by the physical presence of the African memories that filled her home, memories of a lifetime spent in countries and cultures long changed – frightening feathered painted masks, severed animal heads bursting from dark-panelled walls, an elephant’s foot umbrella stand in the foyer. She seemed in constant peril moving about amidst this fascinating interior from a different age.

Now, almost by accident, it seems that we too have amassed our own stockpile of animal parts. I’m not sure how this happened. But I find these relics scattered amongst our everyday belongings. On the bookshelf in our living room, along with wedding photos and knick-knacks, lies a two-foot long walrus penis bone and a couple of dolphin vertebrae. In a glass petri dish on the window sill rest two tiny white jaws, a single curved canine at the end of each leading a parade of triple-pronged saw-like teeth that once belonged to an Arctic fox. A precious white feathery mass, roughly the size and shape of goose egg, sits proudly atop a mounted metal base. This is a special one to bring out at dinner parties! Who would imagine that this is what a polar bear poo looks like? And then there are the ones that haven’t quite made it to display. The musk ox skull and assorted reindeer antlers jumbled together by our front door step. The slender white curve of a whale’s rib in the cool darkness of the attic, together with a couple of reindeer hoofs, still attached to their respective feet and ankles. And, prized particularly by me, the reindeer skull and antlers with a rare shock of white fur still attached to its scalp. If Donald Trump was a dead reindeer, this is what he’d look like.

These are almost entirely found objects. Except for the one we killed, ate and then kept bits of.

My son seems to have developed similar interests. In the summer, after a day of sailing and exploring rocky shores he returned to the boat where I’d been napping in the sun with a gift for me, presenting it with pride. It was a fish eyeball on a flat slab of rock. Over the next days it sat drying in the sun, unrelentingly in its accusing stare.