Egg

When your skin is clean - as clean as you can get it - it is actually rawhide. It has a very papery texture, or can even feel like cardboard. Mrs Fox's facial skin had gone absolutely solid. I was a bit worried about that, because it hadn't dried in the most flattering shape. But eggs came to the rescue.

The recommended way of going about preserving a skin and making it supple is to use the actual animal's brain. It's called brain tanning. You mix the brain with warm water and work that into the skin. The protein does some kind of chemical magic to the skin and helps it become supple. We had buried Mrs Fox's remains, so that wasn't an option. The next best thing, apparently, is egg. I used the eggs I normally buy: free range and organic. I didn't think Mrs Fox, who had been a free creature all her life, would have appreciated eggs from battery hens.

I took a few days to egg the skin. On the first day, New Year's day 2007, I massaged egg into the face and paw skin by hand, using a wooden spoon only for the large areas on her neck and head. To my great satisfaction, I managed to get most of that supple again, by sheer hard work. I massaged and massaged her face and her cheeks until the skin moved again. Only the lip on her left side, the side where she was badly bruised, stayed solid. But I was very pleased with the result.

Then the next day I egged the main area of the skin. This time I used a wooden spoon the whole time to apply egg and work it into the skin by pushing and stroking. You have to keep working the skin until the egg has completely dried in. The egg yellowed the skin a little, but not as much as I expected. And it only took about three hours for the whole thing to dry, with two applications of egg.

On the third day, I decided to give her another egging on the skin of her back. Her chest and belly skin are very thin and supple, but the back area, all the way from neck to tail, is quite thick and tough. It still felt a bit papery, so I gave it another go. I don't actually know if that did any good. What I do know is that I shouldn't have used a wooden spatula to do it. I managed to create another little hole in the skin.

Smoke

Thursday was smoking day. Wood smoke, so I have learned, contains formaldahyde and creosote. If you hang your skin in the smoke of a fire, it will take up these chemicals. They preserve the skin and make it a little more water resistant.

Ideally, you need a smoke house. You can't just hang your skin over a burning fire, because that would burn it. Anything that's too hot for your fingers is too hot for the skin, Thomas from Trackways had told me. You need a really smoky fire - just add some damp wood - and then you have to find a way to direct the smoke away from it and onto your skin. You have to tie your skin into a cone shape, so it acts as a chimney and the smoke goes through it.

No description can do justice to the Heath Robinson device that Alex put together for this purpose. It involved the garage doors, some picture wire, a couple of wire coat hangers, and one of those flexible foil tubes that can concertina out. We hung the fox skin over the garage doors, with the tube leading from my fire bowl, via the coat hangers hanging from picture wire. And it worked a treat. If the smoke works to preserve skin, I will stay young forever, because I got my fair share of it. And the skin got thoroughly smoked, too. And the smoke really did yellow her.

Mrs Fox has done her fair share of smelling in the last month or so, but now we have given her a whole new kind of stink. She smells thoroughly smoky. I'd love to leave her outside to air for a while, but the weather is predictably wet these days and she'd just get soaked. The smoke might help make her more water resistant, but a serious wetting isn't really advisable.

So that means Mrs Fox is finished. I want to give her fur a brushing out so she looks clean and sleek all over. And when she smells of smoke less strongly she can come and live here in my room with me. But other than that the job is done. Finished. I can't quite get used to the idea. It's been such a major part of my life for about five weeks, I can't believe there isn't anything else to do.

But I am proud of the result and very grateful to Mrs Fox for allowing me to work with her, to all my Druid friends who gave support and advice, to my friend who helped and supported me through the night of skinning, to Thomas for his expert directions, and above all to Alex, who is just amazing. Thank you so much.