It’s been a quiet week, I know. I took the kids up to Roseville this weekend to drop off the bear and take my Gramma to lunch, and I had a whole post written about that, but WP ate it. Oh well, it wasn’t very well written anyway, so I didn’t bother to rewrite.

The taxidermist, though, Aaron at Western Wildlife Taxidermy, really impressed me. I’d spoken with him on the phone, but you have to see the work before you know if you want to drop off your trophy with someone. Once I saw his stuff, it was decided. I was having a hard time communicating what exactly I wanted to do with the bear, but he understood me. He flipped through the forms catalog until what I wanted jumped out at me; I hadn’t seen any examples of that on the internet, but apparently it’s done enough to have a stock form available. He seems to be quite an artist, and I’m completely comfortable leaving ol’ Big Bastard in his hands. I expect to get back that once-in-a-lifetime mount that really shows off the white spot.

I’d asked Aaron to send out the skull to be cleaned too. He uses Skulls Unlimited, which the kids thought was pretty neat, as they were profiled in Dirty Jobs this summer. Hell, I thought it was neat too; I’m as big a fan as they are (although with much dirtier undertones…call me, Mike!) But one Aaron got the head skinned out, he called back. I knew that I’d broken the jaw and one of the canines with my first shot, but he said that there are two more holes in it. The thing’s just too shot up to hold together well through the cleaning, and it really wouldn’t be worth the money. He’s going to saw off the three remaining canines so I can keep the yellow old teeth.

Seamus wants one of the claws, which Aaron said he’d pop off the back feet for me, so maybe I’ll make him a necklace with a tooth and a claw on either side of it. John too, although I don’t know that he wants one. You don’t even want to know about the penis bone, which will eventually get hung from my rear-view mirror.

I had no idea that 1) bears have a bone in their penis and 2) that it’s tradition to keep it. My first bear was female, after all. But when we were gutting him, Todd whipped out his knife, sliced the thing off, and handed it to me. I was sure that they were yanking my chain, especially with all of the double-entendre jokes that we flung back and forth for the rest of the day, but I dutifully (and dubiously) stuck it in my shirt pocket and carried it back out with the rest of the bear. Apparently the thing to do is to boil off the flesh (and wasn’t that just disgusting!) and then keep it as an odd, redneck sort of conversation piece. They all said that I might have the biggest one of them all, which struck them as terribly funny, and will be even funnier when I whip it out to compare sizes, which I’ve obviously never been able to do before. Dennis says that it’s a real thing, to keep those, when I cold-called him on it, but he may just be in on the joke. Could be the bear hunter’s version of snipe hunting, but it tickles my funny bone even if I am the target.