My mother loves me. I can tell.
I just received a package, nicely wrapped in duct tape and brown paper, that held within it - a box. O.K., within that box, wrapped with green and white paper, with a drawing of a spider, dancing presumably, was a bunch of tissue paper. Wrapped in that paper was... An Otter Pelt!!!
A bit of background - My totem animal, at least one of them, is the otter.
I have several pelts and an old otter coat that I have collected over the
years.
I would prefer that they be whole and not in pieces, but it is still cool.
This is so different than the gifts she has gotten me in the past - stuffed animals. This time it was an unstuffed animal. There are things I do to Stuffed Animals...
It is a big otter, too. Or at least, it was big. Without the tail, which was sewn back on after tanning, the hide is almost a yard long. To my eye, it is a female river otter, but Fiona, the mother unit, lives out on the west coast, so it could be an ocean otter. It was tanned in the circular way, that means that the body is still contiguous with holes around the throughout and butt from where it was 'pealed' from the meat. This is a common way of dealing with fur animals, like otter, mink and foxes.
Otters could be found almost everywhere in the world, from Japan, China, Mongolia and Nepal to most of Europe over to North America and down to the Amazon in south America. Unfortunately, with hunting for fur, sport and just human meanness, the worldwide otter population has been decimated.
One website I go to to find out about otter stuff is the International Otter Survival Fund . They are in Scotland, but they have had trips to America, Turkey and other places that the Otter is in jeopardy. Check it out.
I also have scanned in a section of the pelt. It is large enough for most desktops in JPG format. Download it!! It is great what you can do with today's technology.
I love the pelt. It is soft, especially on the belly, and the face in intact. The whiskers are like 150 test mono fishing line. And I can put my hand in it and have a puppet...