Still Life

by Melissa Milgrom

  In 1995, Bruce mounted forty West African mammals and birds for the Hall of Biodiversity, a new-style diorama that takes you through an African rain forest. Some of the primate skins were one hundred years old and arrived at the shop without reference. "Reference" is the scientific data taxidermists use to make their replicas. It can be photographs, skeletons, diagrams, even DNA sequencing, anything that helps them sculpt forms that support the biological narrative. Every detail of the animal's anatomy must be convincing in order to pull off the trick: a jaguar's whiskers can purr or roar; a hunting dog's perked ears can sense danger or sniff prey. Taxidermists call this "translating reference." They translate reference all the time. Without a skeleton, however, they have to improvise. When taxidermists improvise, they often turn to the natural world. David walked over to his garden, clicked open his jackknife, and chopped down bamboo stalks of varying lengths and widths to mimic primate femurs and tibias. Then father and son sat side by side and made skeletons out of homegrown bamboo.

  At first I just liked to hang around Schwendeman's Taxidermy Studio and listen to David and Bruce banter back and forth. Then I started to notice that each time I visited, they were working on a different species that required an entirely new set of skills and anatomical knowledge. During these visits, I began to realize that these two taxidermists, often stereotyped as "animal killers," were teaching me to see the infinite variation in all living things. I figured that if I hung around the Schwendemans long enough, maybe they'd open up to me, and eventually they did.

  Soon it was evident that taxidermy was a thriving subculture that extended far beyond Main Street. Some 100,000 taxidermists, mostly commercial practitioners, exist, and they come alive in Taxidermy Today, Breakthrough, and other trade magazines. I wanted to meet them. I wanted to find out if they shared the Schwendemans' extraordinary skills and fascinations. So in April 2003, I left Milltown and the cloistered world of these taxidermologists, with their eagle dissections and stories of Mum-Mum the skinner, and booked a room at the Crowne Plaza in Springfield, Illinois, where taxidermists from across the globe were gathering to strut their stuff as celebrated animal artists.

  2. THE CHAMPIONS

  HAVING DRIVEN FOURTEEN HUNDRED snow-slick miles from Cody, Wyoming, Ray Hatfield was now in the lobby of the Crowne Plaza in Springfield, Illinois, pushing a brass luggage cart with a snow leopard perched on it. He pushed it onto the elevator, rode up to the ninth floor, and then rolled it down the hall to room 918, where he placed the leopard on one of the double beds, its spots curiously blending in with the oak-leaf pattern of the bedspread. Hatfield walked slow circles around the leopard, inspecting it for imperfections. In his hand was a gunmetal silver blow dryer.

  Hatfield runs Nature's Design Taxidermy, a big commercial studio, which serves mostly hunters. He is tall and soft-spoken, with tawny hair and aviator eyeglasses that adapt to the sunlight. On the drive to Springfield, he'd delivered several trophies to customers along the way: elk and deer, a buffalo, an ibex, and a Marco Polo sheep. A few mounts, including the snow leopard, got wet when melting snow leaked into his cargo trailer. Under normal circumstances, damp capes ("cape" is the term used for the animal's pelt, or skin), if quickly caught, are an easy problem to fix. On this day, however, Hatfield couldn't risk even a minor flaw. "I'm trying to get all of its hairs separated down to the skin and make all of the hair patterns lie in place," he said, clutching a wire brush that rapidly filled with soft golden fur. "Everything has to be just right for the competition."

  Hatfield was hopeful of winning a ribbon with the leopard, but his expectations were not high. In this he was realistic. Three hundred fifty taxidermists from twenty-two countries were competing for twelve Best in World titles and $25,600 in cash prizes. For the next five days, Springfield would be what Atlantic City was to beauty queens and Indianapolis is to racecar drivers: the most extraordinary gathering of competitors in the field.

  But Hatfield wasn't there only to win medals. No one was, actually. That was just the pretext. Taxidermy competitions have long been the single most important place—outside of natural history museums—where taxidermists can highlight their artistry. Indeed, the American taxidermy competitions of the early 1880s gave rise to a new movement in artistic taxidermy. The winners went off to work at the leading museums, transforming their halls from dreary morgues of systematic classification into galleries of simulated nature. Elevating taxidermy's status was a goal in Springfield as well. Hatfield, for one, was slated to lead a two-day seminar in which he'd demonstrate how one expertly preserves a leopard. Equally important, the World Taxidermy Championships (WTC) offered him a rare opportunity to talk shop with world-class taxidermists from places such as the Milwaukee Public Museum, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the Smithsonian Institution, and museums throughout Europe. Birdmen from the United Kingdom were flying in, as were fish carvers from Switzerland; midwestern cat ladies with a motherly devotion to lynx, bobcats, and tigers; and "Team Sweden." Arriving from Russia was Vladimir Sukchare, who in 1977 helped excavate and preserve one of the Zoological Museum of St. Petersburg's Siberian baby mammoths. And, accompanied by her father in a matching red polo shirt that said AMY'S ANIMAL ART, was doe-eyed Amy Ritchie, a home-schooled teenager from Midland, North Carolina, whose business cards said PRESERVING THE BEAUTY OF GOD'S CREATIONS. Among the elite were skilled amateurs from many rural outposts and small towns in America, people who prepared deer heads in their garages or plaster-cast fish in family-run shops. All were converging for a long weekend of friendship, competition, and, as the World Show's glossy brochure put it, "inspirational fellowship."

  The lobby of the Crowne Plaza was a veritable Noah's ark on luggage carts. A taxidermist from Nebraska carted a prairie chicken and a mink; a competitor from Pittsburgh had a black squirrel and a freeze-dried snowshoe hare. Green sandpipers, cougars, geckos, a Bengal tiger, brant geese, chum salmon, marmots, rattlesnakes, and snapping turtles were all being wheeled this way and that in the eccentric migration. The bellhops stood by and watched. They had nothing to do, really, because only a slacker would hand over a mount that he had been preserving for a year or more to the untrained hotel staff.

  Cradling a red-tailed hawk in his arms was a taxidermist from Indiana, who paused to say that his raptor wasn't a raptor at all. It was a fake. "It's a re-creation made out of turkey, chicken, and goose feathers," he explained, as if it were perfectly normal to turn chickens into hawks. He was entering it into the show's most fascinating category: Re-Creations. According to the rule book, "Re-Creations are defined as renderings which include no natural parts of the animal portrayed ... For instance, a re-creation eagle could be constructed using turkey feathers, or a cow hide could be used to simulate African game." Imitation or not, this hawk looked ready to stalk prey in Lake Springfield's wetlands. Here, in this convention hotel set amid chain restaurants and highways, a dead circus was coming to life.

  I got in line to register, feeling like a vagrant species blown in by an errant trade wind. In here, a person could not easily hide his or her exotic plumage. Nearly everyone in line was male, and nearly all of them wore camo, stars and stripes, or denim. Several guys had deer tracks tattooed across their forearms. Others wore animal T-shirts or shirts emblazoned with Smith & Wesson logos. A man in a PETA shirt caused a stir until people realized the acronym stood for People Eating Tasty Animals.

  The participants, many of whom were from blue-collar families or had grown up on farms, considered themselves outdoorsmen and hunters, and they reflected a distinctly American approach to taxidermy, one linked to hunting in the spirit of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Lured by the infinite bounty of the unexplored wilderness, early white hunters such as Boone and Crockett considered the American West a sportsman's paradise (a sportsman being someone who hunts for pleasure, not profit; someone who does not, for instance, shoot wolves with machine guns from airplanes, but rather gives his prey a "fair" fight in the wild). The most emblematic Ameri
can sportsman of later generations was Theodore Roosevelt, whose Boone and Crockett Club (1887) promoted what Karen Wonders describes in her Ph.D. dissertation "Habitat Dioramas" as "sportsmanship through travel and the exploration of wild country, through the preservation of big game and through the scientific study of animals in the wild." In the early days of the Republic, big trophies, such as those displayed by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, were thought to disprove the European claim put forth by the French naturalist Comte Georges de Buffon and others that animals shrank and became muted in the New World and men lost their virility. Once that theory was debunked, a sizable moose head (or a record marlin) became more personalized. Rich sportsmen from Europe and the United States wanted their kills and catches preserved to commemorate their prowess as marksmen and adventurers. Soon the American West was dotted with taxidermy firms such as Jonas Brothers in Denver, whose trophies glamorized the thrill of the hunt and who also did amazing museum mounts. Today the big commercial firm Animal Artistry in Reno, Nevada, which has prepared mounts for the likes of General Norman Schwarzkopf and country music singer Hank Williams Jr., maintains that tradition.

  In the gleaming lobby of the Crowne Plaza, however, one could not easily discern mere hunter from true sportsman. Nevertheless, the guys in line did seem to know everything about each species they had prepared for competition.

  As Hatfield and I made our way through the parking lot to his cargo trailer, we passed two truckloads of driftwood being sold for bases. All around us, drivers were carrying odd-shaped bundles. Talons, claws, and webbed feet poked out of blankets and garbage bags that had been cut and taped to accommodate the peculiar forms.

  Hatfield swung open the trailer doors and stepped inside. Leaning against the walls like furniture in a U-Haul was a herd of western origin: a buffalo, two six-point elk, and a large mule deer—deliveries for the way home. "Those are elk legs that go to another guy," he said, pointing to a pair of detached limbs. "It'll be a lamp." In the middle of the truck was an enormous mass covered by a blanket. Ray heaved off the blanket, and there sat his monstrous Barbary lion: a mature male with yellow eyes, a grandiose mane that extended down over its belly, and an upright tail exposing a painstakingly crafted hairy scrotum. The species no longer exists in the wild. An Ohio zookeeper had sold the lion to Hatfield for $8,000 after it had died of natural causes. "I've done about eighty lions, and this is by far the largest," he said with the same nonchalance he had displayed while blow-drying the snow leopard. After the show, the lion was going to the collector who had bought it for $20,700. He paused, considering how to haul this king of beasts to the hotel ballroom where the competition was being held. Even without its artificial sandstone outcrop, the lion was far too big to wheel in on a luggage rack.

  Outside the ballroom was the grooming area. Here, in a wide corridor, competitors frenetically combed, fluffed, and beautified their mounts before taking them inside for judging. For the most part the human:animal ratio was 1:1. But there was also Cally Morris's flock of turkeys. According to the World Show brochure, Morris is a renowned "turkey man" whose turkey-mounting seminars are standing room only. Hazel Creek, his studio in Green Castle, Missouri, mounts eight hundred turkeys a year for international clients (turkey hunters mostly). A former world champ, Morris won Best in World Bird in 1997 with a turkey and has taken numerous other awards since. Here he was competing with five eastern wild turkeys in their late-winter plumage. The gobblers strutted down a leaf-strewn trail. "This one right here is about to get his rear end kicked," someone pointed out. Everyone agreed that the turkeys—with their white crowns, obscene red wattles, and retractable snood covers—were exceptionally handsome. Equally striking were Morris's grooming crew. The young men in baseball caps and matching denim shirts preened the gobblers with oversize tweezers until each plume lay perfectly atop the one beneath it. As a finishing touch, one worker grabbed a feather duster (of all things!) and brushed the birds off.

  While the turkey mounters exemplify the high level of obscure expertise some taxidermists bring here, the deer-head guys represent the most popular category, because theirs is the most hunted animal in the United States. And like the turkey guys, the deer-head guys had their own obsessive preshow rituals. Darrick Bantley, for instance, a twenty-three-year-old taxidermist from Ebensburg, Pennsylvania, was spraying compressed air onto the glass eyes of his one-and-a-half-year-old whitetail mount. "A live animal doesn't have dirt on its eyes," Darrick's father, Dan, explained. Dan Bantley, a round-faced, round-bellied man with lank silver hair and a mustache, was founder and president of the Pennsylvania Institute of Taxidermy and host of a taxidermy show on cable TV. This week he was scheduled to lead the financial seminar "Business: The Lifeblood of a Studio." He was also on hand for some impromptu coaching of his son, which, at the World Show, means ensuring that every anatomical feature—from veining to pupils—is impeccable. Poses, he said, should reflect "the nuance of nature, not the hand of man." Darrick's young buck, for instance, appeared to be "fleh-mening"—that is, it was eager to mate. Its upper lip was curled, and the glands inside its nose were visibly aroused by the scent of estrogen. The deer resembled a snorting, rearing horse on a merry-go-round. Someone at the show said that "antler-fixated" taxidermists sculpt mounts in their own image, and one had to wonder what inspired this particular one.

  Darrick bent down and with ophthalmological precision shined his penlight onto the buck's glass eyes. Dust-free. Nearly every participant had such a light with which to inspect his mounts for flaws. While Darrick was examining the deer's nictitating membrane, or third eyelid (a transparent inner eyelid), Dan recited what I came to consider the World Show's unofficial motto: "First comes anatomical accuracy, then art."

  Nearby, a sixty-two-year-old cattle-brand inspector from Texas considered his mount: a longhorn calf eyeball-to-eyeball with a writhing rattlesnake, barbed wire, and a sign that said I'M WARNING YOU. "I was just going to have his mouth open saying 'I'm gonna get you,' but I didn't think it was appropriate with a little calf like this." A woman from Ontario, Canada, gave her two mating bighorn sheep the once-over. "He's romancing her, to say it politely," she said, smiling with satisfaction.

  When Ken Walker and John Matthews, two taxidermists from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, walked in, everyone set down the feather dusters and penlights and looked up, dumbstruck. The Smithsonian taxidermists brought integrity to the show. They brought respect to taxidermy. But that's not why everyone paused mid-groom. The two men were carrying a life-size giant panda!

  "I've shot bigger pandas than this!" someone joked from the crowd. It was Dan Bantley walking over for a closer look. Only about sixteen hundred giant pandas still exist. Killing one for any reason is almost treasonous (the punishment for poaching a panda in China is ten years in prison), but that doesn't deter everyone. Black-market panda skins can fetch $100,000 to $300,000 apiece. For all these reasons, everyone gazed at the animal until they realized that this panda wasn't a panda. It was another entry in the Re-Creations category.

  That was obvious because the person who had created the panda was the two-time world champion, Ken Roy Walker. If you had to choose a taxidermist who epitomizes the spirit of the WTC, it would be Walker. Although he's a fierce competitor, his unapologetic love of taxidermy, his good-natured spirit, and his ability to inspire others make him a celebrity in the field. Not to mention his uncanny gift for sculpture. Whenever anyone in taxidermy speculates about who will be the next Carl Akeley—which is to say all taxidermists, all the time—Walker's name usually comes up.

  Walker is forty-eight and lives with his family in Alberta Beach, Canada, a small vacation town situated on Lac Ste. Anne, about an hour northwest of Edmonton, the city where he grew up. He is handsome in a rugged, Burt Reynolds kind of way. He's about six feet tall and has bright blue eyes, thick bristly brown hair, and a matching Vandyke beard. There's something of the bearcat in him—the directness of someone who trusts his own instincts. Walke
r has a big, friendly smile and tends to disarm people with his impromptu impersonations of Bugs Bunny and Kermit the Frog. He also enjoys bragging, in a gently provoking way, that he is among the politically incorrect. Because of this, he never seems pretentious, even when he's promoting himself—something he admits he does quite flagrantly. How else do you become famous as a taxidermist?

  If you said Walker's passion for taxidermy borders on the fanatical, you'd be right. He's been this way ever since he was a kid. Even if you find taxidermy bizarre, you have to admire his willingness to sacrifice everything—except his independence—for the profession. Before one World Show ends, he's already gearing up for the next one. At the last WTC, for instance, Walker took third place in Re-Creations with a saber-toothed tiger. The winner was a Labrador duck. "I stood in front of that duck and said, 'What could beat that duck?'" he told me. "I was strategizing. A panda could beat the duck. I didn't want to make American Beauty. I wanted to make Jurassic Park!" Sometimes other taxidermists are jealous of him. They think it's unfair that he's able to spend weeks and weeks on a single mount, when they have to take on commercial jobs for the money. He tells them, "I'm not here to beat you. I'm here to beat the winner."

  Like most exceptionally curious people, Walker can talk endlessly about topics he finds captivating. He's been exasperating people with his passions ever since he was a boy. "When he was dedicated to something, that was his life," his mother, Patsy Walker, told me at the next World Show. "He'd just keep adding on." When he was four, for instance, he held the dry-cleaning man captive in the doorway, reciting an entire dinosaur encyclopedia verbatim. "You better take that kid somewhere—there's something wrong with him!" the man told Patsy. Another time, Patsy had to rescue Aunt Pauline when Walker, who had just learned how to fish, showed up at Pauline's house insatiably curious about bullheads. "Is he pestering you?" Patsy gingerly asked Pauline. "No," she demurred, "but all his wheels are turning." Of course, those incidents were nothing compared to the time five-year-old Ken visited Aunt Mary's house with his pet frog. Mary was sunbathing in a bikini. The frog leaped out of Ken's hands and landed in Mary's bikini top. The top fell down, she went nuts (her boobs were flopping all around), and Ken burst into tears, hysterically crying, "Don't kill my frog, Aunt Mary!"