Still Life

by Melissa Milgrom

  The landscape was a vast expanse of white, blank as a sheet of paper. Ken noticed every track that marked every ditch and hill. "Saw a white wolf here this morning," he said, scanning shoulder to shoulder. "There's been a big cougar hanging around my place."

  Then on to another topic: "As a big fan of Red Skelton, Howard Stern doesn't do a lot for me. If the only way to get attention is to shock people, then you better move to another town. The only way you shock someone with taxidermy is with the harshness of reality. A lion disemboweling a live zebra—that can be portrayed through taxidermy. You can do a doe killing its fawn with its hooves—that's the harsh truth."

  He drove in silence for a few miles, then proclaimed, "Animal rights people are like streakers. It's a fad!"

  Ken was consumed with the upcoming competition. He was entering Re-Creations again and was the big favorite. Some of his rivals had already dropped out; others had switched categories. "The world isn't ready for a Best of Show Re-Creation," he said, boasting that he had already written his acceptance speech. "I want to talk about Carl Akeley and the legacy that he created," he said. Sometime later he added, "People like Carl Akeley and myself lived in relative poverty at the start. He lived in a shack, and so did I. Reading his autobiography made me feel complete." Then, with a smile as broad as Alberta, he exclaimed, "I love how his two wives fought over him!"

  This year Ken was pushing himself. Instead of re-creating something exotic such as the giant panda, he was resurrecting one of the most majestic and mysterious beasts ever to have roamed the earth: the prehistoric Megaloceros giganteus, commonly known as the Irish elk.

  Irish elk weren't actually elk at all, and they weren't exclusively Irish. Taxonomically, they are classified as deer, giant extinct deer—the largest deer ever, except for the cervalces, which lived fifty thousand to ten thousand years ago. Irish elk were so regal and strange, in fact, that they seem almost mythical, like fantasy creatures dreamt up by the French primitive painter Henri Rousseau (1844–1910). So removed are they from our world that people who encounter their mounted skeletons in the National Museum of Ireland (which has the largest collection: 10 complete skeletons and the remains of 250 animals) often mistake them for a strange type of dinosaur or a moose. The reason they are called Irish elk is because their skeletal remains turn up primarily in lake sediment under peat bogs throughout Ireland. Their actual range extended from Ireland to western Siberia and parts of Asia.

  Irish elk were designed for endurance: they were machines of incredible strength and dominance. Mature bucks stood seven feet at the shoulder and weighed nearly a thousand pounds. They had huge chests, colossal shoulders, lithe legs for speed, and strong bodies. But their most distinctive feature was undoubtedly their antlers. This stag had a massive rack—a twelve-foot spread from tine to tine—the largest antlers of any known deer, living or extinct. Nature's ultimate status symbol, these palmated billboards advertised great authority and power and sex (mostly to other deer). For centuries, people have lusted after these antlers. Nineteenth-century fossil hunters dredged every peat bog in Ireland looking for them; kings hung them in castles; people used them to decorate gateposts and bridges, hunting lodges and baronial halls.

  These glorious beasts mystified even Ken, who has spent countless hours hunting whitetails and elk, imagining life in the early Holocene era, when Irish elk roamed. Science is still untangling their story: how did such a resilient species—this stag of all stags—manage to survive the Ice Age, then abruptly die out? Their demise seems like a parable for our own imperiled wilderness.

  Ken called his re-creation a ten-thousand-year-old headache, and he was right. Resurrecting an Irish elk would overwhelm even the most passionate paleobiologist. For a taxidermist in isolated Alberta who'd quit school in the eleventh grade, it posed an incredible challenge. That's primarily because Irish elk exist only in Paleolithic cave art, in fossilized remains, and in Seamus Heaney's poetry. Taxidermists strive to copy nature exactly, but how do you make a microscopic duplicate of a species that vanished from the earth seventy-five hundred years ago?

  Ken's been fascinated with Irish elk since he was a kid. He's seen taxidermic models that he believes are wildly inaccurate: moose with supersized antlers. He's seen museum mounts unnaturally erected to exaggerate their huge size. He's never seen a convincing model, so now he was determined, by obsession and sheer unbridled will, to make one himself. As he put it, "The reason I do it is because I want to see it. If somebody else does it, I can never be sure that they did it right. You know, I wanted to do my own research. I wanted to be absolutely sure that it was the right size and color and everything else, so I picked it because I wanted to see what it would look like if it was done like I believe it should be!"

  Ken's devastating urge to see an Irish elk is hardly unique. Ever since the first Irish elk skull was discovered in county Meath in 1588, naturalists, fossil hunters, anatomists, geologists, climatologists, archaeologists, evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, biomechanical experts, kings, princes, poets, and folklorists have all had a burning desire to know what they looked like and how they behaved. One reason museum models vary from elk to elk is that biologists revise the species' phylogenetic blueprint every few years as they get closer to unlocking the mystery.

  Ken works alone in the middle of snowfields. He has no access to a university's vast resources or a museum's scientific specimens—nor is he a part of those worlds. He couldn't simply waltz into the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits, for example, and borrow their megaloceros. And he wasn't going to Chauvet or Cougnac to study cave art. (He had to settle for photographs and diagrams.) Nor, for that matter, did he have $30,000 for real antlers. (He was using fiberglass replicas.) However, few biologists have had the type of intimate contact with wildlife that Ken has, the years spent in the wilderness hunting bears, sheep, elk, and deer and then reproducing them. Fewer scientists still are in regular contact with the type of unofficial animal expert Ken trusts more than anyone for reference: Canadian trappers. What Ken lacked in academic credentials, he'd have to supplement with his hands, his eyes, and his feet.

  He'd also read every book and article he could find, including studies by famous scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould, who published a landmark essay about the species in 1974. He'd compared that essay with the latest DNA analysis of fossilized remains done by University College London biologists in 2005. But you can't see coat color in DNA sequencing. Ken needed to see coat color. He needed to see coat color like Carl Akeley needed to replicate Africa and Emily Mayer needed Yorkshire terriers to look as if they had died an hour ago. The process of making an Irish elk, it turned out, was a lot like the old fisherman's quest in Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and now I was heading to Alberta Beach to watch Ken wrestle with prehistory.

  Alberta Beach has two seasons: Sea-Doo (Jet Skis) and Ski-Doo (snowmobiles). During Sea-Doo season, the population hovers at around eight thousand; during Ski-Doo season, that figure drops precipitously, to about nine hundred. At this time of year, Alberta Beach looks like a blue-collar resort town coated in snow, which is basically what it is. Hand-lettered signs advertise fireworks, murals of the Chinook and Inuit adorn storefronts, and the dollar store is appropriately named the Loonie Bin.

  We passed an alpaca farm and contemporary log homes with vast yards of grazing horses. Finally, we pulled onto an isolated gravel road and followed it to the end. Ken's house is a brown contemporary wood-frame surrounded by fenced-in snowy fields that in the summer take eight hours to mow. Colette does the mowing—with a riding mower. On its seventeen and a half acres are llamas and horses, a Swedish Haggelund (a military surplus vehicle that Ken rides for fun), and a barn where Ken does his own tanning and keeps his carcass freezer (extraordinarily well stocked). "It's coming down to the wire for me," he said, killing the engine. "If I have to stop now to make money, I won't finish in time ... The home and the family should come first, but..."

  Before we went upstairs fo
r dinner, Ken took me on a tour of his house. It is wood paneled and filled with wildlife paintings and books, animal bedspreads, animal photographs, animal coffee mugs, and, of course, lots of taxidermy. ("It's art, and everybody has art in their house," says Colette.) The finished basement is Ken's terrain: half recording studio (keyboards, piano, amplifier), half trophy room (polar bear, alligator, nutria, white foxes, wolverine, raccoon, tarantula). He showed me the Siberian tiger he mounted as a birthday present for Chantelle, his daughter. Then he pointed to his son Patrick's snow leopard (another present from Dad). "That's my saber-tooth," he said, handing me a photo. "I can do a far better Irish elk."

  Upstairs in the kitchen, Colette was calling the kids to dinner. Colette is a bank teller in Onoway ("Oh, no way!"). She has straight brown, feathered hair and warm brown eyes. Patrick was in the den watching a documentary about Koko the gorilla. Chantelle was looking through the kitchen window at Dalai Lama, one of her "riding llamas." The kitchen is big and bright with large windows overlooking the farm fields and, beyond them, the barn. On the yellow Formica countertops are a panda cookie jar and a panda coffee mug; the floors are blond wood. It smells like home cooking.

  As it happens, Colette and Ken met over a meal. Colette was waiting tables at Boston Pizza. Ken showed up and ordered a pie. She's been serving him deer and moose and bear ever since. When the kids were babies, Colette used to help Ken by sewing linings onto bear rugs. "I hate sewing with a passion," she says. "Now I work for a living. I don't need to do taxidermy." Even so, almost everyone around here defines her by Ken's celebrity. "I just went to a funeral, and I was talking to my cousin's wife. This is my family, and she says, 'Oh, you're Ken the taxidermist's wife!'"

  Colette, who is allergic to deer hides and does not hunt, is the pragmatist of the family, the person who arranges Ken's paperwork at competition time so he can bring endangered species into the United States. cites permits take three to six weeks to process; without them, Ken won't clear customs. Border crossings are always stressful for the Walkers, and Ken is virtually helpless when it comes to filing permits and arranging inspection times. Colette calls him a zoo animal: cage him in, and he won't perform. "If he has to do the paperwork, nothing else will get done. It's all me, and because I don't know a lot of what he does, it's hard. So I have to call [the U.S.] Fish and Wildlife [Service] and get papers organized and whatnot, and then I have to do the Canadian part of it, and if they're not kept up, they expire," she says with a laughing-to-keep-from-crying grin. "For the Irish elk, all we'll need is our provincial papers, so that'll be an easy one. But I don't think that's all he's taking."

  In spite of the financial hardship that comes with having a championship taxidermist for a spouse, the Walkers never want for fresh game. Sometimes, however, Colette needs other things, too, such as milk and toilet paper. One competition time, Colette discovered that she had run out of everything. When people in New York City say they have nothing to eat, it generally means they dislike what's in their pantry. For Ken and Colette, it means the cupboard is empty. As she put it, "No vegetables, no potatoes, no rice, no soup. Yeah, okay, we can eat roast after roast after roast and steak after steak. But you do need the milk and the bread and everything else in between, and there was nothing, and I actually had to call his mom and say, 'You know, there's no more shampoo. There's no more soap. There's no more toothpaste, no more toilet paper, no more paper towels. Nothing left in my cupboards!'"

  It's not that Ken lacks work. Right now he had an entire safari in his freezer that needed mounting, and the Get Stuffed shop in London recently hired him for a gorilla. But those weren't megaloceros. "I don't care about money. That's my problem," he says, shaking his head. For that reason, I'd wanted to stay in a hotel, but Ken wouldn't hear of it: "It'll cost me more in gas to pick you up. And I've seen you drive. You don't want to drive on ice."

  For dinner, Colette was preparing elk—a roast from one of the white elk Ken had shot and skinned at a game ranch south of Edmonton in order to make his Irish elk. Normally, when a customer orders meat from a game ranch, a butcher will prepare the meat, but Ken insisted on shooting and skinning his own elk. He needed the incisions to be properly made so that when he joined the pelts, the seams would disappear. Irish elk were massive, so Ken needed three white elk skins to make the cape of a single Irish elk. It took Ken and two other taxidermists six hours to skin four elk and a deer. They arrived at the game ranch at nine A.M. and were back in Alberta Beach, skinning out elk hooves and ears, by five that evening.

  Re-Creations is a tricky category at the WTC. For years, the National Taxidermists Association refused to recognize its legitimacy. In Re-Creations, for instance, you can't use an elk to make an elk; you have to use a different species. Otherwise, it's not a re-creation. For the same reason, you can't make a prairie chicken out of a prairie chicken or a lobster out of a lobster. You can, however, use a chicken to make an eagle or a lizard to make a snake. Irish elk weren't actually elk; they were deer. Their closest living relative is the fallow deer, a much smaller species, with which it shares 90 percent of the same DNA. So it's perfectly legal for Ken to use an elk to make an "elk" that was a deer.

  It's a good thing he wasn't competing with a vulture or a domestic cat, because Colette was now serving us hot slices of roast re-creation Megaloceros giganteus. This competition mount was heavenly.

  Dinnertime, as it happens, was when Ken's five siblings used to ask young Ken about taxidermy. They found his approach to nature baffling and told him so. They said that someone who loves animals should not kill them. It became a Walker family refrain. "They had a mindset that I should not kill things. My mindset was totally different," he says.

  Ken owns four guns. He believes that gun control is like communism: "great on paper." "In Canada, there aren't enough noncompliance laws. There aren't enough prisons to arrest us all," he explains. If it weren't for hunters who manage animals, he adds, species would be depleted by farmers (who find them a nuisance), by indigenous people (who sell them for food or Chinese medicine), or by developers (who destroy their habitats). "Tree-huggers use toilet paper. The biggest predator is the newspaper," he reasons. In 2004, for instance, black rhino hunting was reopened in Namibia: $150,000 a rhino, something Ken believes is good for the species. "Take away the value, and you take away the animal," he says.

  Scientists believe that the Irish elk's antlers may have had something to do with their extinction. Exactly what that was, however, has been confounding people for centuries. One aspect they agree on is this: an astonishing amount of fuel is required to grow hundred-pound antlers in four months every year. One theory contends that the ecology of the land changed, becoming too densely forested for a hulking species adapted for life on the open plains. Another suggests that the elk's antlers "over-evolved," becoming too massive for its five-pound skull to support. Still other theories say that climatic changes and habitat loss from early humans (who also may have hunted the elk) made it impossible for it to find the phosphorus- and calcium-rich plants it required to regenerate new antlers every year. As a result, the species developed a type of osteoporosis and died out. This is the theory that most scientists adhere to today.

  The first naturalist to write about the "large and stately beast" was Thomas Molyneux (1697). Molyneux got the story half right. He knew the elk had vanished from Ireland, but the idea that a species could go extinct was heretical at the time, and therefore unthinkable: God would never snuff out one of his own creations. Even Thomas Jefferson, a great fossil collector, would have to be convinced of something as controversial as extinction. Instead, Molyneux hypothesized that the elk was alive somewhere. Indeed, he claimed that the species had migrated to North America (where animals shrank), and people there called them moose.

  The French were among the first to accept the concepts of both extinction and evolution—but they found these ideas mutually exclusive. The two leading naturalists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Jean Baptiste
de Lamarck and Baron Georges Cuvier, were archrivals. Lamarck believed in evolution but not extinction; Cuvier believed in extinction but not evolution. Cuvier, the founder of vertebrate paleontology, was a "catastrophist." He theorized that animals dispersed and became extinct due to apocalyptic floods, earthquakes, and other global environmental disasters. An eco-soothsayer, Cuvier claimed in his four-volume Research on Fossil Bones (1812) that the Irish elk had died out during the last "great freeze" along with the mammoth. Recent radiocarbon dating of skeletal remains, however, has proved that the Irish elk survived the big freeze and lived with prehistoric humans into the early Holocene—three thousand years after the ice sheets receded, around seventy-five hundred years ago. Humans, it appears, may have done this beast in.

  The Victorians found the Irish elk a most perplexing creature. They believed that its ever-evolving antlers were a liability and cited the elk as an example to disprove Darwin's theory of natural selection. Undaunted, Darwin said that the elk's antlers were not weapons but "splendid accoutrements" for attracting mates. In 1974, Stephen Jay Gould confirmed this theory: although the antlers did intimidate rival suitors, they were primarily three-dimensional aphrodisiacs used to lure females to the male's "lek" (a patchwork of territories it had staked out). Then, in 1996, Gould retracted that conclusion: giant deer did use their antlers in combat after all.

  In 2004, a team of University College London biologists revised this portrait once again. They examined the DNA of the fossilized remains of two Irish elk from two widely different extremes of its geographic range (one discovered in the Ballynamintra Cave in Waterford, Ireland, the other in Kamyshlov Mire in western Siberia) and confirmed that its closest living relative is the fallow deer, not the red deer as previously believed. All of which brought these scientists, and now Ken, back to mating.