The Bone Guy
I been thinking about starting
up a hobby I had long years ago when I was still in school. It may not be as
easy as it was back then. I am not able to wander the woods like I used to and
I don't trap anymore. Trapping and Mr Delso are what got me started the first
time I did this but it only took a couple of times before I realized that It
was interesting and I really enjoyed it. Gathering bones is the hobby.
The thing that got me going was
Mr. Delso asking if I could get the skull of a coon for him. Since he asked
during hunting season I didn't see any problem and sure enough I had one for
him the next week. He didn't tell me why he wanted it or what he was going to
do with it so I just cut the head off one after I had skinned it, dropped it in
a paper sack and took it to school with me. I found out after dumping it out on
his desk that it wasn't exactly what he had in mind. Seems that he just wanted
the skull, no flesh. I didn't really know how to do that so he took some time explaining
it to me.
The next time I caught a coon I
took the head home and boiled it till the flesh got soft enough to fall off
then all I had to do was take a knife and scrape it off the skull. I'm glad he
wanted a coon skull to start with because I found the hardest thing to do was
to get the brain out. Since it was a fairly large skull I was able to insert a
knife into the base od the skull and just cut everything up and dig it out. I
was pretty proud of myself over that first one so I decided to get one for
myself and while I was at it, I'd make me a skull collection of all the animals
I caught during trapping season.
By the end of that first season
I had at least one skull of every kind of animal I had caught. I thought they
were neat, Grandma on the other hand, didn't seem nearly as impressed with them
as I was. One thing I will say about her, she didn't care for the final product
and she didn't know why in the world I wanted to collect them but she never
said a word about me using the stove to boil them. I did have to take them
outside to clean them which I figured was fair. By the end of the following
summer I had added bats, birds, squirrels and snakes and was thinking about
moving on to something else.
My first attempt at a full skeleton
was a possom. The plan (which seemed like such a good one at the time) was to
boil the whole body just like I had done the heads then clean all the flesh off
and put the skeleton back together. Let me tell you, that's a whole lot harder
than it sounds! Not only is it a royal pain in the butt trying to clean all the
flesh off an entire animal but boiling does strange things to the smaller
bones. Since no one else around was weird to even think of something like this
I had no one to ask for a better idea so I was stuck trying to figure out how
to do it on my own. I tried a few more times that winter but never did figure
out how to make it work right. I started working on the feet because that was
the area I had the most problems with. I was finally able, after about 20 trys
to get all the bones from a coons foot cleaned. The problem was the bones
themselves. Since I had boiled them they were soft when I started cleaning them
and when they dried out they would change shape and start bending. I got them
cleaned and laid out but by then they looked like a deformed foot instead on
the one I had started with. I kept trying that winter but I was never able to
figure out how to keep the bones correct while they were drying.
My next great plan came to me
that summer while I was out squirrel hunting. I was sitting down by the creek
taking a break when I noticed some ants dragging a big grasshopper back to
their nest. They got him to their ant hill but he as too big to fit down the
hole. It took them about a minute to use their jaws to cut him into smaller
pieces and down the hole he went. I wonder?? I cleaned one of my squirrels
taking all the meat I off I could and lay him next to the ant hill. I figured
they would strip all the meat and leave the bones. I didn't think that first
attempt all the way through because when I came back the next day to check on
it, my squirrel was gone. The second time I carefully lay a good size rock on
top of the squirrel to try and keep anything else from taking it. I put a
couple of smaller rocks under the big one so the ants would have room to crawl
over it and the big rock wouldn't crush the bones. It took the ants almost a
week to strip it but at least it worked, kind of. I gathered all the bones
up at the end of that week and took them
home to finish cleaning them. I lay them out as I cleaned them (I still didn't
have a clue of how to connect them) and that's when I found that's it had
almost worked. I was missing most of the small bones, mostly toes. I figure
they must have been small enough for the ants to take them into their nest. One
more squirrel, one more try, this time I wrapped the squirrel in fine mess wire,
big enough for the ants to get through but small enough to keep them from
dragging any bones away. I found an ant hill closer to the house that time, so
I could keep a better eye on them. I left the squirrel for almost two weeks,
turning it every few days to make sure the ants got everything.
Finally got a complete skeleton,
now what do I do with it. My plan was to put it back together and make it look
like the ones you see in museums, the problem was that I had no idea of how
they do that. I tried just gluing them all together but they just kept falling
apart. Next I tried running wires through the main bones, spine, skull, legs
etc and bending them to get some kind of a pose, that kind of worked with the
big bones but the only way I could figure to attach the bibs and smaller bones
was with clue, still didn't work. The next shot was to drill holes in the end
of the bones, insert a small piece of wire and add a little glue. FINALLY I got
something that was starting to look like it was supposed to!
It took me two more summers to
get to the main thing I'd wanted to do from the start. That summer I was able
to re-assemble the complete skeleton of a rattle snake. By using the wires in
drilled holes not only did I get it put together but I was able to get it
coiled with the head raised so it looked like it was getting ready to strike.
That was my last one. I gave most of my skulls to my Mom who was at a total
lost as of what to do with them, she ended up donating them to the high school
science department in Chandler
As for me, I worked my butt off
figuring out how to do it and true to my short attention span brain, as soon as
I did figure it out, I lost interest and moved on to other things.
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