Since becoming a mother, I've done lots of things that I would have never forecast in my pre-children life. Killing cockroaches with my bare feet, camping in the rain, breastfeeding a two-and-a-half-year-old, using gas station bathrooms, smelling another person's rear end, carrying a dead bird for two miles out of the forest … the list goes on.
I'm not the only one. Ask any mother you meet and she can list innumerable acts of love she has performed for her children. But my friend Juliana takes the cake for the most outrageous act of love I have yet discovered. You see, she recently traded a neighbor a homemade carrot cake for a dead beaver head that she planned to decompose so she could give it as a gift to her skull-loving children.
It all started years ago when her son Noah was a toddler. A very earthy family, they spent lots of time camping and hiking in the wilderness. As they walked, they would pass the time by collecting treasures. It started out simple. They would fill their pockets with interesting things they found—colorful rocks, feathers, acorns, petrified wood, small fossils, and seashells.
One day, while hiking in the sand dunes of West Texas, they came across an intact skull buried in the sand. What a find! Noah was ecstatic. They brought it home and carefully researched what animal it might be. Noah felt like a real skull detective as they sleuthed out the specimen in a dusty old book of animal skeletons.
It was a feral pig. Noah was hooked. And thus, the hunt for skulls began.
The next skull they found was that of a dog in a local forest preserve. Noah's father Matt found it while running and carried it home 17 miles in his pocket to his delighted son. After that, it's all a blur. Skulls of all kinds of animals were discovered, carefully transported home, identified, and placed in the Skull Hall of Fame (formerly known as the dining room hutch.)
Snapping turtle, snake, coyote, javelina, turtle, frog, cow, bighorn sheep, goat, deer, hummingbird … and that was just the beginning. They became skull connoisseurs. They collected books on skulls and discovered websites like Skulls Unlimited. Juliana and Matt had more children and each one became quickly educated and involved in the family business. At the age of three, Micah was able say to his dad, “Pop, that's so not a coyote. The eyes are on the side of his head. It's gotta be a deer or something.”
Recently, a beaver was found destroying the trees on the property of Matt's parents and their next-door neighbor. The neighbor decided to eliminate the beaver.
When Juliana heard about what was happening, she rushed to the phone. “Could the beaver be put down in a way that would not affect his skull?” she wanted to know. She was willing to offer just about anything in return for a perfect beaver skull. It would make the ultimate Christmas gift for her kids.
The answer was yes. The neighbor remembered that Juliana made a mean carrot cake. He would trade her the intact beaver head for a homemade cake. At dusk. On the edge of the property.
The exchange was made. But, of course, the beaver head was fresh. Exceedingly so. Now Juliana had to figure out how to break the head down in a way that wouldn't cause her to vomit repeatedly, as she was nine months pregnant at the time.
After extensive research on the Internet, she decided against boiling it, hacking at it, or leaving it in a tree to be eaten by birds. She and the children buried it in the yard beside the chicken coop. According to her calculations, nine or ten months from now, natural decomposition should have done the trick—and the beaver skull would be the newest family treasure.
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