Opossum fur (Australian preferred) Natural brown and white mixed (Guard hairs for the tail, a big clump for the body, one thinned tuft for the collar)
Wire rib Copper/brass wire (Brassie size, four or five turns)
How to tie it
Slide the 2.8 mm gold tungsten bead onto a size 12 1x long nymph hook, add about eight wraps of lead-free wire and jam them up into the bead.
Start gray thread behind the wire, build a dam behind it, wrap over it and dam the front, then bring the thread back toward the rear.
Tie in a brassie-sized copper wire rib.
Pull a small tuft of possum guard hairs, strip out the underfur, and tie them in on top as a tail, short but not insignificant. Bury the butts rather than trimming them, the body is fuzzy enough to hide everything.
Wax the thread, then pull a big clump of possum fur taking some brown and some white, strip out the guard hairs and roughly finger-mix it. A poor mix just gives you a variegated body, which looks good anyway.
Spin about a three-inch noodle, leaving it thick, and dub the body forward to a little behind the bead, licking your fingers to tighten the noodle as you go. Do not bother with a precise taper.
Counter-wrap the wire rib forward in four or five turns, then break it off by pulling tension and spinning rather than cutting. Bury any sharp nub with a few loose wraps and back the thread off from the bead slightly.
Clamp a tuft of possum fur in a parallel-jaw material clamp, snip it off the hide, and thin it out substantially. Form a three or four inch dubbing loop with the thread, insert the clamped fur into the loop, let the thread close on it, and spread/trim the fur while it sits in the loop.
Spin the loop tight with a weighted dubbing spinner (thirty or forty turns), grip the resulting brush with hackle pliers, and take three or four wraps of it right behind the bead to form the fur collar. Tie off and snip the thread core.
Whip finish behind the bead, then pull loose fibers out with your fingers, brush the collar back with velcro, and trim any fibers that are too long.