Bog Myrtle & Peat

Given the weight of feathers and leaves and glittering stones which litter my office and my life, it’s clear that I suffer from an impulse to collect things. Sometimes I hope that by holding onto these objects, I can perpetuate the memory of gathering them – and that as life flickers past, it seems reasonable to mark the rush by pulling for fragments along the way. The problem is that while I have an extraordinary talent for picking things up, I have no capacity for keeping them. And once an object is in my collection, I simply rush towards the next in a fluster of enthusiasm.

In due course, fragile flowers and seedheads are flattened between books; delicate skulls fall down between my desk and the wall. In due course, I tread on something with a crunch and realise that I have lost some half-remembered treasure. In this way, I’m like those dredging nets which are now blamed for destroying large sections of the ocean floor. I gather things and kill them by accident – then I fling the pointless remains back into the sea as I plunge onwards and deeper, gathering more.

It was my plan to keep and clean the skull of a pike. I have become fixated upon these fish, and a suitable candidate emerged from the depths of the river Bladnoch in March. Once he’d been killed and eaten, the head was left gaping sadly on the passenger seat of my truck. I reckoned that it would be fine to display the jaws on a shelf above my desk, and I could frighten my son with the prospect of needle-teeth banked in scintillating rows like some schiltron of ancient infantry. But fishbones are finnicky things, and I couldn’t risk the usual work of boiling that head down into mush in the manner of a roe buck or a stag. It would require a more delicate approach – so I skinned the skull and poached away the meat in a shallow pan of steaming water. Then I placed it on a stack of wood in the yard and waited for the sun to bleach the dregs into brightness.

I had imagined that a pike’s skull would be like a dog’s or a fox. I thought that the head would slot neatly into the jaw and the two might work together like shears. I didn’t realise that nothing in a pike’s head is fixed in perpetuity. Everything can move, and there are no easy up-and-down hinges to be found anywhere. The head itself is designed to be flexible and bulging as a carrier bag – when the pike strikes towards prey, his face explodes and is held together only by silken and highly-perishable membranes. As my skull was bleached by the sun, the membranes fell away and the form collapsed into a litter of semi-transparent cornflakes. I’m left with certain bits of lips and jaws, but the awful serrations of teeth have lost their edge in isolation. It’s just a mess.

An American man has made a video about preserving fish skulls. I watched it too late, and learned that I should have been ready for this collapse. With care and a fair measure of glue, it would have been possible to salvage the shape of this head – but in some ways I should be glad that this project failed. It’s one less ornament to lose or crush when other ornaments come.