I ran over the poor creature at night. I saw it just as it went under the car. I stopped and stared at it. Everyone asks whether I got a puncture. No. I don’t think those spines are up to punching through a steel radial.
So there I was, staring at a roadkill monotreme and feeling guilty. It didn’t even look injured. Just dead. I picked it up and put it into the car, not having any idea what to do with it. Into the freezer it went.
Here's a living echidna in Kangaroo Island.
By the end of work the next day, I had decided that I might as well stuff it. It looked straightforward. Any mistakes I made with the skin would be covered up by the spines.
When it was thawed, I ran the scalpel down the centre line if its belly and made the cuts along its legs. So far, so good. At this point with a normal mammal, the skin comes off the body like taking off a glove. The difficult areas are the feet and the head.
Not with the echidna. I slid my hand between the skin and the membrane, expecting them to come apart easily. They didn’t. Each of the spines had a root that went deep into the animal. Each one had to be dug out individually. There were hundreds of them.
After an hour of digging, I stood back and had a look at my progress. It was a horrible mess. I had torn the skin in places. It would need sewing and, on a skin like this, I wasn’t looking forward to it. It occurred to me that it might not be worth going on. I thought of how I had ended the life of the poor, innocent echidna and kept going. At least I could make some kind of memorial to it.
When I finished, it was late at night. I salted the skin, rolled it and packed it in plastic. Then I went home. The skin stayed in the freezer at work for over a year. My last act on leaving that job was to take it out and place it, as gently as I could, into the skip.
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