B for Baculum

They looked like something a witch doctor would wear around his neck; a dozen or more bones on a wire.

I was about seven years old and was out in the garage with my dad when I first noticed them.

"What are those, daddy?" I asked.

"What's that, son?" dad asked in turn, looking up from whatever it was he was doing.

"Those bones on the wall there." I replied, pointing to them.

I remember my dad smiling as he paused; I waited on him as he thought about his answer.

"That's the business end of a gentleman coon." he said after a few seconds, grinning as if there was some private joke in his answer.

I frowned as I thought about his answer. "Business end?" Hmmm.... I knew the barrel of a gun was the "business end", so maybe this too was something dangerous, maybe it was some sort of claw the raccoon had. Whatever it was, they certainly looked cool, almost like ivory.

"Can I have one?" I asked my pop.

"Sure." he said, and reached up and got the set off of the garage wall. "You can have 'em all." and handed them to me.

I was thrilled. I didn't know exactly what I had, but I didn't much care.

"What are they good for?" I asked.

"Well.." dad considered the question, with another small grin on his face. Snickering a little bit, he went on: "They're not much good for a coon now, but some guys make keychains, even whittle them down and make toothpicks out of 'em. "

"They polish up real good." he told me. "I'll get'cha a little steel wool and you'll see."

By now you've figured out just exactly what the thing is, I expect, and if you haven't, your mother and/or father should've explained the birds and the bees to you a little bit more, I think.

From Wiki:

The baculum (also penis bone, penile bone or os penis) is a bone found in the penis of most mammals. It is absent in humans, equids, marsupials, lagomorphs, and hyenas, amongst others. It is used for copulation and varies in size and shape by species. Its characteristics are sometimes used to differentiate between similar species.

The oosik of Native Alaskan cultures is a polished and sometimes carved baculum of various large northern carnivores such as walruses. The raccoon baculum is sometimes worn as a luck or fertility charm.

The word baculum originally meant "stick" or "staff" in Latin. The homologue to the baculum in female mammals is known as the baubellum or os clitoridis or os clitoris.

It's too bad there wasn't the Internet when I was a kid; otherwise I wouldn't have taken it to Show and Tell the next week.

My teacher had a funny look on her face when I told her it was "the business end of a gentleman coon", but it wasn't anything like the one on my dad's face when he first "explained" what it was.

The look on my momma's face when the teacher called her and told her about it was an entirely different one altogether.