The range of anatomical wares was dizzying, and they were all unfathomably legal. At Skulls Unlimited, the world's largest osteological specimen supplier, a Goth-looking salesman manned a table of skeletal remains (mandibles, skulls, exotic horns). He was describing how taxidermists, skeleton assemblers, and museums use dermestid beetle colonies to eat the flesh off skeletons so that their intricate structures stay articulated. At the Tohickon booth, thousands of glass eyes, each painstakingly crafted, stared up at browsers. The fox, bobcat, and lynx eyes were hand-veined and hand-colored, and they had the accurate slit pupil (offered in two widths, depending on whether the taxidermist wants to portray his mount in daylight or at dusk).
Only Fred Fehrmann, the bearded owner of a fake-fur factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts, seemed vaguely out of place—that is to say, urbane, East Coast, and decidedly not anatomical. This despite the pronunciation of his name: "fur-man." Fehrmann manufactures polyester fur of the theatrical variety, the kind of synthetic tresses big Hollywood productions use to create monsters, yetis, and talking lemurs. Fehrmann's typical clients are LA prop men, Manhattan costume designers, and stylists who don't, for instance, shoot lions in order to make lion costumes. Banking on his success in show business, Fehrmann thought he'd have crossover appeal with taxidermists. He was mostly wrong. "That stuff is made to fool a camera, not a taxidermist," said Walker indignantly. Although taxidermists freely use fake septums, fake eyelashes, and fake claws, they'd rather die than use fake fur. More modelmaking. This may explain why Fehrmann's booth was quiet, drawing few taxidermists but lots of children, who came by to pet swatches of the Grinch, the Teletubbies, the Hamburglar, and Rum Tum Tugger from the Broadway musical Cats.
For me, Fehrmann's booth was a respite, a chance to rest my eyes and enjoy a bit of mainstream culture. However, tongues were my destiny, because soon I was at the "Jaw Juice: Stronger Than Critter Breath" booth inspecting rippled bobcat tongues with Jan van Hoesen, one of taxidermy's pioneering cat ladies. I had interviewed van Hoesen earlier that day in her hotel room, and I knew that her presence at a booth was something like having Venus Williams browse in a pro shop—a celebrity endorsement.
Van Hoesen is a former junior high school science teacher with a passion for felines, especially lynx and bobcats. After attending her first taxidermy competition in the 1980s, she was appalled by the ferocity of the mounts. Determined to depict animals humanely, she decided to eschew prefab anatomy (aggressive and mean) and cast her own custom bobcat (playfully stretching). She entered the bobcat into the 1992 World Show, took Best in World Mammal, and inspired many followers. "I really love the fluidity and gracefulness of the animals and the wonder of their movement," she said. "I don't like to see them snarling. That's more of a he-man thing. After all, how many women and families with kids want to have a vicious, snarling cat in their living room?"
This may explain why the shoppers at the fair were predominantly men. Even so, van Hoesen was inspecting howling, snarling, and panting tongues and talking shop with the Jaw Juice owner. She agreed to try his new bobcat jaw set, then examined his fake coyote throats and beaver teeth, explaining in a teacherly voice how beaver teeth are self-sharpening and grow throughout a beaver's lifetime. I had not seen any self-sharpening, ever-growing beaver teeth so far, but where artificial tongues are sold, there's bound to be fake saliva. Jaw Juice! "It's kind of niche," said the owner's son. I nodded. Then he squeezed a dribble of it (a clear adhesive) onto an artificial coyote tongue ("panting") and dried it with his own breath.
Before the World Show, I half jokingly told the Schwendemans that I'd come back to New Jersey so transformed and excited about taxidermy that I'd want to mount something myself. But now as I riffled through "how to stuff a squirrel" videos, my mind swirling with detached limbs and a sea of flat fur, glass eyes, and a freeze-dried monkey before me, I felt a dull nausea rise up, and I doubted that I could skin and stuff a chicken.
Just then, Ken Walker, who was strolling from booth to booth, stopped by. Walker has the alert eyes of a hunter, and those eyes landed on the manuals in my hands before I could hide them. I didn't want to get him going. There's nothing Walker likes more than to convince someone to pick up a scalpel for the first time. His face lit up. He launched into a mini-version of his lecture upstairs customized for a wary outsider. Within seconds, he handed me a manual and a video for the aspiring squirrel stuffer. I hesitated. I wasn't sure I wanted to buy these things just now, but then I remembered how he had told his seminar audience that he never takes the safe road, and I paid up. After that, Walker led me to another booth so that I could see his red fox display. Its silky fur was so smooth that I petted it impulsively, forgetting how important coat sheen is to a taxidermist. Before I could muster an apology, Walker had grabbed a comb from his back pocket and fluffed it back up.
Meanwhile, upstairs, the judges, having already selected the winner in each category, were wrangling over which one would win Best of Show. In a way, the job was ludicrous, because the judges had to compare a bison with a Gene Simmons (of Kiss) tongue to a bogus giant panda to a pair of delicate tree sparrows. I could sense the rivalries among the various factions, especially between the bird and deer judges. ("The deer guys are neurotic, and the bird guys are nuts," explained Paul Rhymer, a Smithsonian taxidermist whose father and grandfather also had worked for the museum.) Eventually, the judges handed their ballots to head judge Wesley "Skip" Skidmore, curator of animals at Brigham Young University's Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum. The winner would be announced that night at a banquet in the Grand Hyatt ballroom.
I retreated to my room to dress for the ceremony. With its mundane décor, creature comforts, and view of Hooter's, the room had no regional feel. It was certainly devoid of taxidermy's roiling subculture. It was, in a nutshell, predictable, and I embraced its blandness. I tossed my purchases into my suitcase so that I didn't have to look at them, then opened the mirrored closet doors and selected an outfit. As I slipped into black dress pants and a trim brown turtleneck, then tied a giraffe-print scarf around my neck in a fashionable knot, I suspected that my outfit was all wrong; it was far too casual.
And it was. The World Show banquet wasn't a church picnic in the boondocks, but the Grand Ole Opry, the Academy Awards, and the Super Bowl halftime show combined. The women arrived in long shimmering gowns, festooned with bright jewelry. The men, shaved and showered and camo-less, were dressed in dark suits and ties or dress shirts and slacks. Larry Blomquist, the master of ceremonies, wore a black tuxedo; his cohost and wife, Kathy, wore a sleek black gown and cherry red lipstick. Everyone was dressed to kill.
The mood was buoyant, convivial, familial, as everyone exchanged greetings, bought rounds of drinks, and found seats among their friends. Ray Hatfield tried to tame his lively daughters. Skip Skidmore, Jack Fishwick, and Ken Walker resembled corporate lawyers. As they made their way to their tables, stopping to chat and shake hands along the way, it was hard to picture young Skidmore preserving his pet hamster Little Nipper, Walker tracking bears, or Fishwick dissecting "confusing fall warblers." There were a few exceptions, of course, notably a pony-tailed fish carver in a Hawaiian shirt, who reflected the individualism most taxidermists embrace.
The lights dimmed for a moment of silent reflection, followed by the Lord's Prayer, recited in unbroken unison. Then two teenage girls in prom gowns sang "The Star-Spangled Banner." During the national anthem, I glanced at my paper place mat with its photo of geese flying over a taxidermy trout and logos for the National Rifle Association, the National Wild Turkey Federation, and the Safari Club International, the largest hunting lobby in the world. Our caesar salads arrived, and the ceremony began in earnest.
Seated on my left, a trade-show salesman from Louisiana described his fear of Chicago; he expressed his reluctance to soak in the hotel's hot tub because of its potential to double as a toilet. A fresh-faced blond taxidermist from Michigan sat across from us. Stories of his African bow-hunting adventures kept me riveted
during what turned out to be a very long evening.
In the end, the ceremony resembled a large family reunion, an American jamboree. But the family wasn't too insular to keep the Best of Show prize from going to a European—Uwe Bauch, for his tree sparrows. As we left the ballroom, I asked everyone why the tree sparrows had taken the top prize and not, say, the bison. Over and over, they repeated—as if it were obvious—essentially the same answer: the sparrows looked truly alive.
Aside from an excursion or two, I hadn't left the hotel in five days. While I was packing the next morning, I began to feel like I was trapped in a tightly sealed diorama. I needed some fresh air.
Through the window, high above the parking lot, I watched Ray Hatfield roll his African lion back to his cargo trailer. His wife pushed the sandstone base. They trudged in single file, their daughters straggling a few paces behind. Hatfield hadn't won any of the top prizes. His lion and snow leopard had taken second place in their respective categories. "The judging was really difficult this year," he later said matter-of-factly, and he was right. The low scores arguably reflected the most intense scrutiny ever witnessed at an American taxidermy competition. In fact, after the show several people complained to the promoters that the judging had been too harsh and nitpicky. Hatfield, however, wasn't among them. Yes, the judging had been painstaking and exacting. "But that's good," he said, squinting in the bright sunlight. Good for taxidermy.
As three grimacing men hoisted the lion into the trailer, I pictured father, mother, and daughters driving along Dirksen Parkway en route to Cody, Wyoming, delivering the moose, the elk, and the mule deer mounts on the way. But the World Show wasn't entirely over. That night was the BYOB wind-down party: a few more hours of solidarity before everyone headed back to their individual workshops.
The distinct shadow of a bird of prey appeared at the edge of the parking lot, and I unlatched the window and leaned out to see whether it was the same counterfeit hawk I'd seen when I'd arrived. The air was cool and invigorating, and as I craned my neck to find the source of the shadow, a real bird cried out, eerily piercing the silence. It was probably some common bird—a grebe, perhaps, or a killdeer—but its call was strong and clear and full of life.
3. THE MAN WHO HUNTED FOR SCIENCE
VETERINARIAN-RADIOLOGIST William J. Hornof is x-raying dead elephants to see if they can be saved. "It's too late. They're dead," he jokes as he walks under the biggest bull, a regal specimen shot in 1910 by taxidermist-explorer Carl Akeley after two years of hunting. (Only two-hundred-pound tusks would do!) The bull measures roughly ten feet six inches at the shoulders and twelve feet at the top of its head and appears to extend its trunk as if disturbed by an intruder. It's one of eight freestanding elephants that form the monumental centerpiece of the American Museum of Natural History's Akeley Hall of African Mammals. And Hornof, a silver-haired Californian with radiant blue eyes, is in New York City on this sunny June day in 2004 to see whether the museum can prevent them from suffering a second death—that caused by too much petting. Lately the elephants have also been fraying around the ears from something completely foreign to their central African habitat: air conditioning.
Usually the hall swarms with excited schoolchildren. "Hello, little gorilla!" they shriek, pressing their noses to the diorama glass as they have for more than seventy years to see if the gorillas will tumble and bark and beat their chests. Sometimes the kids draw the scene as if it is actually the Congo, not viewing an exact replica—they haven't lost the ability to imagine that it is real. Naturalists and artists come here to escape the city. The hall is a shrine for everyone at the World Taxidermy Championships who considers Carl Akeley the greatest taxidermist who ever lived.
Of all the early taxidermists, Akeley is the one I found most intriguing. He lived during taxidermy's golden age, when taxidermists of his stature traveled in sophisticated circles, were handsomely paid, and made astonishing exhibitions. The French have a word for work of his magnitude: naturalisation. Naturalisation is the gourmandise (gluttony) of taxidermy. No one consumed nature like Carl Ethan Akeley.
In his era, Akeley was famous. His adventures still draw comparisons to Indiana Jones and other swashbucklers. But Indiana Jones never killed a leopard by shoving a bare fist down its throat, sewed the scalp back onto a mauled Nandi spearman, or raised a vervet monkey on Central Park West. (J.T. Jr. had her own bedroom.) Mostly Akeley is known for blazing a trail that took taxidermy from the single menagerie specimen to the majestic diorama, which is why it made sense for me to start my search for him here, at his masterpiece, African Hall.
But on the day I show up, a sign saying DO NOT ENTER blocks the entrance, and Hornof and a squad of conservators are x-raying the elephants. They want to see whether the superficial cracks have caused internal structural damage and if so, how to make the elephants sturdy enough to be preserved for future generations.
"Okay, I'm going to have to shoot this one," Hornof says, pressing the shutter of the x-ray camera, which resembles a yellow scuba flashlight and is typically used to diagnose injured racehorses.
"Okay, we're ready to shoot! Ready to shoot!" shouts Stephen Quinn, AMNH senior project manager (aka "Mr. Diorama"). Everyone races out of the radiation zone, then returns to analyze the elephant's scaffolding on a computer monitor.
The two-story hall is dark green serpentinite (a volcanic stone from Vermont) and has twenty-eight dioramas that form an oval around the elephants. Each bay contains an intimate scene of Africa at dusk or at twilight or in the bright midday sun. The hall's subtle light and dramatic shadows have been compared to watching Africa through the windows of a magical train that does not disturb the animals. I'm upstairs near the colobus monkeys, resting my elbows on the marble balcony as if it were a rocky escarpment. Without the usual crowds, the Cape buffalo and mountain nyalas look ready to gallop out of their glass cages and into Central Park. It's a compliment, and something of a taxidermic cliché, to say that a mount is so lifelike you could swear it moved, but the animals here look suspended in motion. Every muscle, whisker, and wrinkle work together to convey, say, the direction of the wind or the scorching heat of the desert.
The next time Hornof yells "Shoot!" a vision of Akeley's famous elephant hunt with Theodore Roosevelt comes to mind. In 1909, the Smithsonian sent Roosevelt (and 260 porters) to Africa to collect specimens, and the AMNH sent Akeley on a similar expedition. The two safaris merged in Kenya, as planned, for a drink and an elephant hunt. Akeley spotted the perfect cow for his museum group, Roosevelt bagged it, and Roosevelt's son Kermit shot its calf. At least that's what Akeley used to say. One biographer suggests that Akeley secretly substituted a larger cow for the president's. Although he craved the publicity of a Roosevelt mount (Roosevelt was his hero), he craved perfection even more. Such was his vision of nature.
It took Akeley and three assistants six years to mount three of these elephants. He and forty native porters skinned and skeletonized them using jackknives in the steamy veldt. Each elephant was painstakingly reduced to four rolled-up skins, preserved with brine and local beeswax. Each skeleton was scraped clean and numbered for anatomical reference. Before Akeley, no one had achieved such startling realism. The elephants appear to trumpet through the hall, displaying the attributes Akeley most admired in them: sagacity, versatility, and comradeship. Paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews, the intrepid explorer, described them like this: "If you want to see a live elephant, you can go to a circus or a zoo. But if you want to see the way an elephant lives, you go to a good museum of natural history. And you owe much of what you see there to the genius of Carl Akeley."
It takes a certain driving passion to want to reproduce a twelve-thousand-pound elephant in all its savage splendor. To duplicate the flora and fauna of an entire continent requires the stamina of a madman. Akeley had the energy of three men and the will of twenty. His quest for realism was insatiable. Every twig, every grain of sand, every star in the sky had to match what he himself had witnessed on one
of his expeditions.
I wanted to know more about Akeley. I was especially curious about African Hall, his magnum opus, because I was going to the Smithsonian to watch Ken Walker and the other taxidermists work on its new mammal hall, and I wanted to see what museum taxidermy was like at its peak. In the AMNH archives, I saw Akeley's most intimate handwritten notes, in which he wonders whether a taxidermist can ever be a true artist—especially in the eyes of J. P. Morgan and other rich patrons of the museum. I came across an inventory of every tool and artifact in his studio, which was located in one of the old mammal halls and was called "the elephant studio" by everyone, including, I imagine, the security guards who'd see Akeley working late into the night and hand him a flashlight so that he could get around the place in the dark. I read letters from his divorce lawyer, in which "grounds for desertion" and "tanned topi skins" are discussed with equal importance. Stacks of telegrams fill the archives. They are marked Kabale, Nairobi, Arusha—alluring places where he embarked on his daring wildlife expeditions to collect the skins for these dioramas. One cable reports his tragic death in the Congo in 1926.
If taxidermy were a profitable profession, Akeley's life would be a rags-to-riches story. Clarence Ethan Akeley (later called Carl) was born in 1864 and grew up on a farm in Clarendon, New York, in near poverty. A quiet loner who hated school, he was happiest wading in the fields and swamps around his home, gazing at his friends the birds and other creatures. Not long after Akeley visited the stuffed menagerie of an Englishman who dabbled in taxidermy, he preserved a neighbor's canary that had frozen to death. "Please don't cry," the twelve-year-old said, consoling the grieving owner. "I think I can fix the canary for you. It won't sing, but I think I can make it look as if it could." After that, he borrowed a taxidermy book and spent hours in his room, dissecting and preserving dead animals. Taxidermy was then a popular hobby. Theodore Roosevelt's father nurtured his young son's love of birds and the outdoors with taxidermy lessons. Not so for Akeley. His parents, stern farmers, found taxidermy macabre, impractical, and a waste of time. One relative had this to say about Akeley's "queer" obsession: "Shouldn't he be put away, where in confinement he might recover from his apparent madness?"
Still Life Page 7
