Still Life

by Melissa Milgrom

  Because he either loves something or finds it terribly boring, Walker pretty much hated school, even preschool. His parents still call him "a play-school dropout." His teachers had little patience for him. When he was in third grade, he'd show up for school with his pockets full of dead muskrats that he had trapped that morning and would skin at home after lunch. If he found a topic interesting, he'd interrupt the class with innumerable questions. If he found it boring, however, he'd wait for the teacher to mess up some fact so that he could correct her. One teacher got so fed up with him she asked if he'd like to teach class. He ran to the front of the room and started to talk and talk.

  Luckily, Ken's parents, who are terrifically good-humored, found his idiosyncrasies a sign of intelligence, and they supported him by letting him "tear apart animals in the garage" as long as he cleaned up the "scrunge." "Sometimes I didn't like it when my garage bench was covered with guts," said his father, K. D. Walker. "But I let him do what he wanted." They did this because he was unwavering. When he was drawn to something, he doggedly stuck with it, even turning down a family trip to Disneyland so that he could work at a taxidermy shop. That was in junior high. Now the thing that fuels his curiosity is formulating scientific theories about how prehistoric animals lived (or died out) and then using that information to resurrect them.

  He also loves hunting. "It cleanses my soul," he told me later that year at the Smithsonian Institution, where he was working on a contract basis. Indeed, Walker dresses like a hunter even when he's indoors. At the World Show, for instance, he wore a khaki hunting shirt with a built-in shoulder patch to cushion the recoil of a shotgun, even though he never left the hotel. In his view, worshiping nature and shooting animals are perfectly compatible endeavors. "A cougar lives outdoors, and he loves to hunt. Our DNA is ninety percent the same as the cougar's," he reasoned.

  In the 1980s, Walker owned a bear-hunting outfit called Svartbj0rn (Black Bear), guiding mostly Norwegian hunters through Alberta's vast subalpine forests. He moonlighted as a Roy Orbison impersonator. "I can really sound like him," Walker said, staring into my eyes and nodding.

  Relating to animals so viscerally is one reason—indeed, the most important reason—Walker excels at taxidermy. "You can almost hear a heart beat. You can almost see the spark of life, and it's a gift to bring the spark of life back," he said. "As a taxidermist who can do his job, I'm indispensable. But as an individual, I'm going to do it my way." He paused and then said, "Some people fit into history nicely. Others have to bully their way in."

  At the time, Walker was three months into a nine-month contract at the Smithsonian, which was erecting a new mammal hall and had to hire independent taxidermists because it had closed its taxidermy workshop in the late 1960s. Before he'd left for the museum, however, Walker, who had never seen a real giant panda, had begun to make a fake one. Not a run-of-the-mill forgery, but a panda so convincingly real that you could almost hear its heart beat.

  The first step had been finding suitable skins. "I was a bear-hunting guide, an outfitter, for ten years, so I have plenty of hides in the freezer, but I didn't have the right brown ones," he said, explaining that he needed two black bear skins for the job. Black bears can range in color from blond to brown to black. Ken needed two brown-colored bears in their blond phase. That means that the fur appears brown but is actually blond at the roots. "I needed the bear to be shot on September tenth, so its hair wouldn't be too long," he explained. "If you tell people that, you can usually get one in a week," he added in the same dispassionate tone you'd use to order a mobile phone. I stared at him, perplexed, and he softened and said, "When I'm driving, I'll swerve in the street to miss a frog, but I'm by no means a bunny hunter." (A "bunny hunter" is the hunting equivalent of a "Sunday painter.")

  When Walker arrived at the Smithsonian, he had access to unbelievable reference: the frozen carcass of Hsing-Hsing, one of the two pandas Mao Zedong gave President Richard Nixon on his historic visit to China in 1972. (Nixon gave China a pair of muskoxen in return.) Hsing-Hsing had died at the National Zoo in 1999, and the museum had acquired his carcass, storing it in three parts: the carcass, the cape, and the head. "They're afraid to mount it," Walker said, shaking his head with frustration. The museum saw it as a potential political fiasco. Nixon's panda had become a powerful symbol of East-West détente, and no one wanted to offend the Chinese. Somehow, in spite of this, Walker got permission to make a template of it. "You think of the odds," he mused. "There I was with the only panda specimen available, the only fresh reference—meaning carcass—right there in the freezer!"

  Much like a forensic scientist outlining a murder victim on a sidewalk, Walker traced Hsing-Hsing's carcass onto paper and used the template to make his own panda's inert body. He bleached the blond bear's cape white using Clairol hair dye, then he cut and sewed it and another cape together. Using a brown bear face as a model, he cast its lips, teeth, ears, and tongue. He reshaped bear claws to use as panda claws, inserting an extra one into each paw to serve as the panda's sixth "false" digit. "Being a visionary taxidermist, I knew what it was going to look like," Walker said with the élan of a champ. "But I had never seen a panda before, and there I was holding one!"

  Now, at the competition, Smithsonian lead taxidermist John Matthews (Walker's boss) described "Thing-Thing" to the crowd: "That's a reproduction. Ken made that out of two different black bears, and he put them together. Now he's going to put a whole mess of bamboo trees on the base." Like reporters covering the spectacle this would have been had Thing-Thing been Hsing-Hsing, the taxidermists fired questions at Walker.

  "Is it a male or a female?"

  "You cannot tell the sex of a panda unless you perform surgery. It's more or less generic," Walker said, boring holes into the platform and planting bamboo.

  "I got knocked once for not having nipples on a black-squirrel mount that was peeping into a hollow log," noted Randall Waites as Walker cemented bamboo stalks onto the base, bending one near the panda's mouth so it appeared to be playfully munching. "Which way's the sun shining?" Waites asked as a follow-up, eyeing the bamboo to see if it was bent in the proper direction—that is, oriented properly given the sun's supposed alignment.

  Under his grandiose handlebar mustache, Matthews broke into a huge smile. "This is the Super Bowl of taxidermy right here!" he said.

  That night Jody Green, a commercial taxidermist who was manning a booth at the taxidermy trade fair, and Dan Bantley sat in the hotel lobby talking shop over a beer. They discussed the ordeal of molding stellar lip lines. They described the limitations of prefabricated deer forms (not enough slack around the neck). Then they analyzed a snapshot of a deer eye, passing it back and forth like a shared cigarette. Exactly where should the eyeball sit in this particular socket? Perhaps it was the beer or the long day of travel, but soon I was bleary-eyed. How much of the eyebrow do you see if the eye is positioned at thirty-three degrees? The questions revealed an aesthetic that favored literal representation, to say the least. I got the impression that if they could outfit a deer with a working heart and lungs, they would. Why not simply go to a forest or drive to Springfield's Henson Robinson Zoo and see the real thing? I wondered. Why kill it just to obsessively bring it back to life?

  The moon rose, and a guy walked by with a mute coyote tucked under his arm. Green and Bantley were too engaged to notice. "We're all trying to duplicate nature," said Green.

  "You always go back to nature," Bantley agreed.

  "We're judging another man's interpretation of nature. My job is to use my interpretation of nature to judge another guy's interpretation of nature," said Green.

  "What's different between this deer and a real one?" Bantley mused, explaining not only what taxidermists think about when they lie awake at night but, more important, what will be on the minds of the judges the next day at five P.M., the start of the competition.

  "When you go into that room, you're looking for that topend deer. I'm looking for something that pleases m
e and that's your top-shelf deer," said Green. "That's the drawback to this whole thing. There's some interpretation in it."

  Taxidermy is so outsider, it's not even included in Outsider Art fairs. Competitions are where taxidermists have always demonstrated the potential of their art. The first American taxidermy competition was held in 1880. It was organized by the Society of American Taxidermists, a brotherhood of scientists, professors, museum men, and taxidermists who wanted to elevate taxidermy from amateurish craft to professional-grade fine art by proving that it could be both scientifically sound and artistically evocative. No longer would the isolated taxidermist, too "jealous" to share his knowledge and too steeped in "conceit" to seek it out, languish in anonymity. Instead, taxidermists would "throw open their studio doors to the public until the only secret left was to imitate nature." Or, as G. E. Manigault, an honorary SAT member from the Natural History Museum at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, put it in 1880, "There's no reason why the taxidermist should not hold his head as high as any man. He is eminently a student of nature, and when, as a result of his observations and skill, he is able to produce a counterpart to life itself, he is entitled to rank on the same level as painter or sculptor."

  Getting from point A to point B, however, took years of determined struggle by these talented artisans, who would eventually transform Chicago's Field Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, the Smithsonian Institution, the AMNH, and other museums into grand galleries of artificial realism. But of course, this being taxidermy, the momentum gained in the 1880s had all but evaporated by the mid-1970s. By then, taxidermists had forgotten the whole "good PR" thing, and their mounts were crude and sensational (with some exceptions). Predators baring sharp teeth and suffering from gaping arrow or bullet wounds glamorized man's dominance. Some taxidermists also had apparently stopped studying anatomy and turned out bobcats with stumpy forearms, deer with misaligned joints, and other monstrosities. Scientists, curators, and other potential employers stayed away. Soon taxidermists faced a pre-1880 dilemma: where to demonstrate their expertise to a public that equated their craft, through years of negligence and unscrupulous taxidermists (who preferred shotguns to binoculars), with shooting Bambi's mother.

  In 1974, a taxidermy maverick name Joe Kish, disappointed by the mounts he saw at a National Taxidermists Association convention, believed that taxidermists needed to improve their craft. So he decided to host the first American taxidermy competition since 1880. Kish is an industry insider who ran a taxidermy magazine for nine years. When I met him in Springfield, he was living on a three-hundred-acre exotic-game ranch in Mountain Home, Texas ("Texadermy" to Kish). One night Kish and I met for a beer in the hotel bar. Smiling under the brim of a stars-and-stripes baseball cap, he explained how taxidermy had been slumping in the 1970s. By then, most museum workshops had shut down, and the 1973 Endangered Species Act was, taxi-dermically speaking, limiting available subject matter. People were trading in shotguns for cameras. Kish has an impressive résumé—Carnegie Museum, Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Jonas Brothers, and Cabela's hunting stores—but in the 1970s, even as he was doing top-notch work, he feared that his profession was becoming obsolete. Remembering how the SAT competitions had revolutionized taxidermy in the 1880s, he organized his own competition, hoping for similar results.

  The first SAT exhibit, a six-day event, took place in 1880 in Rochester, New York, then the taxidermy capital of the United States. Rochester was where the famous specimen emporium and museum supplier Ward's Natural Science Establishment was located. Founded by Professor Henry Augustus Ward in 1862, Ward's hired the best taxidermists, including the seven SAT founders. Ward's resembled a college campus—except the entrance gate was adorned with massive whale jawbones and every building overflowed with treasures that would eventually form the core collections of the Field Museum, the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, Princeton University, and many others. In the late 1800s, famous taxidermist-explorers from Europe passed through Ward's, talking of grand expos in France, England, and Germany where taxidermists displayed futuristic mounts to a public hungry for sensational renditions of nature. In spite of this, Professor Ward was profit driven and reluctant to change (to become too artistic) at a time when museums had no dioramas. Taxidermy was then primarily a tool used for comparative morphology (the study of the form and structure of an organism). Birds, for instance, were stuffed, tagged, and lined up in uniform rows for comparison by type.

  Forty-four members from seven states—the largest gathering of taxidermists ever—and hundreds of eager spectators attended the first SAT show. What they saw inside that gaslit hall dazzled them: staggering creatures from the farthest reaches of the earth, everything from bison to iridescent hummingbirds. Most of the mounts were crudely executed, typical of the era, but then there was William T. Hornaday's A Fight in the Tree-Tops.

  Tree-Tops wasn't a single menagerie specimen stuffed with straw and hemp until it bulged, but a rain forest melodrama in which two male Bornean orangutans viciously fought over a female, while swinging from artificial vines! The larger of the two males had bitten off the middle finger of the other, and the victim's face writhed in agony as blood oozed from his mutilated hand. Hornaday himself called the apes "hideously ugly" and the display a "trifle sensational." That was intentional; he wanted to create a stir similar to the one Parisian taxidermist Jules Verreaux's shocking Arab Courier Attacked by Lions had caused at the 1867 World Exposition in Paris. He succeeded.

  The greatest American taxidermist of his era, Hornaday was also an ardent evolutionist and passionate naturalist. He knew that scientifically sound fighting apes would incite both the lurid public and the sober scientist, and that's exactly what happened. The judges—leading museum men from Cambridge, Princeton, and Manhattan—awarded Tree-Tops the top prize. As much as Hornaday loved the limelight, however, he loved animals even more, and scholars do consider Tree-Tops to be the first large mammal group appropriate for scientific display. As a result, it revolutionized taxidermy by inspiring others to aim for accuracy in their art.

  Hornaday, a towering figure and eloquent speaker who dined with Andrew Carnegie (a lifelong friend and SAT patron) and other elites, wielded tremendous influence in the scientific community. He served as the first director of the National Zoo and was the director of the New York Zoological Park (Bronx Zoo) for thirty years. His ardent conservation campaigns brought national attention to the plight of the American bison, the northern fur seal, and the white rhino. His efforts to save the passenger pigeon, a species that vanished in 1914, were, sadly, less successful.

  Hornaday went to work for Ward's in 1874, during its glory days. Previously, while at Iowa State College, he had read books by world-renowned naturalist-explorers, including John James Audubon's Birds of America and Paul Belloni Du Chaillu's Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. At Ward's, he also hunted specimens for science.

  He got the idea for Tree-Tops on a two-year collecting expedition through the East Indies and Borneo. Ward's sent Hornaday there to collect crocodiles, Bengal tigers, water buffalo, primates, and other exotic species for his museum clients. While he was in Borneo, the twenty-four-year-old Hornaday spent hours on the banks of the Sadong River sketching orangutans and gibbons, more convinced than ever that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was right. This did not deter him from his primary responsibility: to shoot them. In all, he killed forty-three primates (twenty-seven orangutans), surpassing Darwin's colleague (and friendly rival), the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who in 1855 collected twenty-four for scientific study and display.

  In 1879, Hornaday returned to Ward's with a diagram of a Tree-Tops-like primate group, vines and all. Henry Ward was skeptical. At the time, no museum had a display case combining large mammals and artificial foliage—a "habitat group" to museums. Ward doubted that any museum would pay for something so expensive to make, so cutting-edge, and so violent. It was one thing to admire an ora
ngutan in a painting or to read about one in an explorer's tall tale. But to see "real" primates engaged in bloody combat without having to trek to Borneo was something else altogether. How better to depict how species fight for survival?. Ward gave in, and Hornaday went to work.

  That August, Hornaday presented Tree-Tops at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an organization of scientists and museum men devoted to advancing science and serving society. As he described his field studies (explaining, exuberantly I imagine, how orangutans are not ferocious—indeed, they can be quite docile and playful), the attending scientists were riveted. Then he unveiled his case, and the orangutans appeared in the room as if by magic. Here was the jungle complete with creeper vines, moss, and bellicose apes. Even Hornaday could not convey in words this type of theater, which was electrifying, if a bit overwrought. The scientists were tantalized. After the lecture, George Brown Goode, curator and assistant secretary of the Smithsonian, offered Hornaday the position of chief taxidermist at the National Museum of Natural History. Albert'S. Bickmore, founder of the American Museum of Natural History, commissioned a tame Tree-Tops for his museum.