Still Life

by Melissa Milgrom

  If the Irish elk was essentially a giant fallow deer, one can assume that it mated like a fallow deer. The fallow deer is one of the few species in which females, which tend to travel in herds, select their mates. Back to the antlers. Female fallow deer lust after stags with impressive racks, and alpha stags mate with as many females as possible, often fathering thirty to one hundred fawns a year. Ken described the situation like this:

  "A fallow deer, when he ruts, during the mating season, has an area of ground he calls a lek. And what happens is, they flash their antlers and they attract cows like a harem onto this lek. If another buck or bull comes into that lek, they will force it off ... There's a confrontation, and they do a display, like a ritualized dance. The Irish elk is no different. He would use his horns to attract the females in and his body size to push his rivals off. That's the way it had to be. Natural selection favored big antlers and heavy bodies. Only the biggest, widest-antlered bulls would actually mate, so their genetics would always go in that direction."

  This was the stag that Ken was re-creating. I was thinking about all this the next day when Ken and I drove to his studio to see his Irish elk in progress. Ken's studio is on an unpaved road next to the trailer where the Walkers lived up until six months ago. Approaching it, we saw an unkindness of ravens taunt a bald eagle, and a coyote dart over a hill just as Ken pulled over and lowered his window.

  The studio is about the size of a two-car garage. That day polar bear feet, patches of kudu and wildebeest fur, and Kenneth E. Behring's skinned walrus head and tusks—all frozen solid—were scattered around the yard. We passed them to get to the door, which said WALKER STUDIOS. "I don't know if it's the best thing I've ever done, but it's the most fantastic," Ken said by way of prelude. "I want people to go ballistic, to feel they are going crazy, seeing something they can't believe is real." Then we entered the Holocene.

  Past a wall covered with taxidermy awards, past shelves of reproduction prehistoric skulls, was a massive hulking form covered with plastic sheeting. "She's kind of suicide blond now," Ken said, peeling off the plastic sheets. He hadn't modeled its facial features yet, or set its large amber eyes, or cast its small ears. And the blond pelts that he had described the night before at dinner—now stitched together to form a new animal—were held onto the form with long upholstery pins. But it was 100 percent megaloceros, which is to say the most masculine stag imaginable. Back at the house, Ken had shown me a few photos. They didn't come close to conveying its imposing scale and grandeur: its huge chest, its colossal shoulders, its powerful hump.

  "It's starting to look like a real animal now," he said, walking over to a sawhorse that held a roughly nine-foot rack. The antlers weren't real. They were a fiberglass model that Ken had had custom-cast for $3,500 at Prehistoric Animal Structures, a local company that makes fake dinosaurs. (Later, he bought another rack, a thirteen-footer, from Taylor Studios for $5,000. Eighty-five hundred dollars in antlers quickly depleted the Walkers' savings. Nonetheless, the one anatomical feature you can't sacrifice when making an Irish elk is antlers. The family would recover when he sold the elk, preferably to a natural history museum. His asking price: $75,000.)

  "I'm not into antiquities. It doesn't do me any good if they look like antique antlers on top of a live elk," he said, lifting the nine-foot rack off the sawhorse and walking over to his imposing buck. When he held the antlers above the elk's head, I could sense the animal's magnificence. I could imagine it standing high above the grassy plains, its antlers radiating sunlight like a beacon.

  Ken had a buck on his sweatshirt and another one on his baseball cap. He circled his elk, looking for flaws that the World Show judges would catch, such as exposed seams. When you sew three animal skins together, even longhaired bulls, imperfections will emerge. Each leg may have up to ten different hair patterns. As in fine tailoring, the hair separations must align, or you'll lose points. "To impress the judges, sometimes you have to help them decide if you should win, and craftsmanship and attention to detail is one way," he explained.

  Ken is nearly six feet tall. The elk was three feet taller and about as hairy. Ken groomed the elk's neck mane, applying Dippity-Do to every strand. He combed its tail (deer have tails; elk have stubs) with a wire dog brush. "Kind of cool, huh? I've used one hundred twenty-five yards of fire-line [thread] in that. I've got to be out of my stinking mind!" he said, shaking his head and smiling.

  Before he put on surgical gloves to texturize the antlers, he handed me stacks of reference. Then he spent the next two days describing how he would make an extinct animal so alive that "people who have studied these things their entire lives would believe that it is real."

  This is how he did it. First, he had John Matthews, who was still employed by the Smithsonian at the time, measure their Irish elk skeleton for reference. If Ken used that diagram, unaltered, to make his own elk, it would be a template. Ken would never use a template that he hadn't drawn—even one derived from the Smithsonian specimen—because the articulations might fall short of his own exacting standards. Today most biologists say that museum-mounted skeletons are unnaturally erect to emphasize the species' size, and Ken agrees. "I'm really fussy about my articulations. A lot of times I don't agree with the way a skeleton is rearticulated, so I go to anatomy books to see where the scapulas are supposed to sit and how straight the legs should be to hold the weight of those animals. Obviously, an animal that weighs one thousand pounds isn't going to hold his legs half hunched, because it is too stressful. There are references to physics in the whole thing."

  He had no carcass to cast or erode. He was working from the inside out: skeleton, muscles, skin, fur. He redrew the Smithsonian skeleton, bone by bone, onto plastic sheets, which he cut out and reassembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle. When he was done, he had a flat skeleton. But he still wasn't ready to carve the form.

  Ken is a gifted sculptor. He can shape rippled muscles with unerring accuracy by eyeballing diagrams or flat pelts. To do this, however, Ken had to know how an Irish elk's muscles behaved in motion and at rest. Fossilized remains, skeletons, and DNA sequencing don't show an animal's soft parts—its musculature, fur patterns, and humps. In fact, because fatty tissue does not fossilize, the Irish elk's hump wasn't officially confirmed until Stephen Jay Gould's study. He also needed to know how the animal behaved and sounded. But that data must be obtained by observation. How could he get it?

  Fueled by a fierce curiosity, Ken posed the same questions asked by people such as Gould and the famous nineteenth-century British anatomist Sir Richard Owen: What kind of adaptations would enable an animal with a five-pound skull to support one-hundred-pound antlers? (Answer: incredibly powerful neck vertebrae and large muscles and ligaments.) What kind of form would a creature with massive dorsal spines (the third, fourth, and fifth spines are each a foot long) have? (Answer: a broadly raised area at the shoulders.) And so on.

  For clues, he studied Paleolithic cave art: seven caves throughout Europe, particularly the Chauvet and Cougnac caves in France, whose megaloceros paintings are considered most accurate. Ken was collaborating with prehistoric humans, the first animal artists. "It's like comparing the Bible to yesterday's newspapers," he explains.

  To someone who isn't a paleoarchaeologist or a taxidermist or Gould, the twenty-five-thousand-year-old icons resemble stick figures, static silhouettes. But Ken saw all kinds of clues in them. He saw how the animals looked in life and in death. He studied how they were shaded to determine their fur patterns. He believes that they were mostly light-colored, except for dark swaths along their humped backs, down their briskets, and ventrally, along their stomachs. He believes that they had short ear manes and dark throat manes and that their slender, pointy-snouted heads were disproportionally small and never held bolt upright, as they are in museums' mounted skeletons. He explained his scientific method as simply and as directly as a taxidermist would: "Two different caves. Two different time periods. One animal." He was using ancient reference to make an elk
that looked as if it had rubbed off velvet four weeks ago. "There are some things I'll have to guess at, but it's an educated guess: dark animals have dark eyes; light animals, light eyes. It has to be scientifically sound—my interpretation of fact. Why would three generations of cave painters paint the same animal?" he asked.

  Once he had answered these questions, he put a second sheet of plastic over the flat skeleton and drew on the muscles, so you could see the bones underneath. Imagine the human anatomy section of an encyclopedia where each layer of anatomy (the skeleton, the organs, the muscles, the skin) is on a separate sheet of Mylar. The sheets are then sandwiched together to make the body.

  Finally, he took his knife and started carving the form out of big foam blocks. He carved muscles that flexed and muscles that rippled. He carved tendons that contracted and tendons that were relaxed. "It's like mixing a cake, a dash of this and a pinch of that. You know, you have to feel the consistency in your hands," he said offhandedly. "My take is half-cooked, and I'm still inventing the rest of it. A lot of people don't like the way I work. They want to know exactly how they can get my results without taking chances. There've been a lot of happy experiments in my shop."

  I asked if he'd devised the method. "I don't think so. From the moment there was Styrofoam, people have been doing it."

  After he carved the body, he cast the head and the hooves (moose) in polyurethane foam and ordered custom fallow deer eyes. Now he had to do the finishing work: texturize the antlers, cast the ears, and sculpt the nose patch. I sat in his studio for about a week, watching him, thinking about what Gould and all the other scientists, and even the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney, would think if they walked in here right now and saw this stunning beast. Frozen in mid-trot, it was crossing a creek to drive off a rival bull that was approaching its harem. Its small slender head was low and upturned, its nostrils flared. Its left foreleg was aggressively raised. Its hump and fringy mane were shaded as in the Chauvet cave paintings. I stood and stared at it for a long time, overwhelmed by its ability to evoke confrontation and tension. I let its presence pull me into the Holocene with the same brutal magic and tragic force that the French writer Charles Baudelaire said made dioramas as concentrated as theater. Then I imagined the conversation that Ken might have with Gould if this were a different era and the leading taxidermists and the most imaginative scientists were colleagues (or fierce rivals!)—coconspirators who shared a love of and curiosity about animals and, indeed, preserving them, so that someday, when they are gone, there will be a lasting record.

  Ken has a gift for sculpture and for music. He could have, for instance, earned a living as a singer, but he doesn't like to be around drunk people, and he hates cigarette smoke. In 1993, he worked as a Roy Orbison impersonator, performing at clubs around Alberta. He was so spot-on that he received top billing over "Marilyn Monroe" and "Frank Sinatra." He got the job when a scout for Starz and Legends saw him sing "Only the Lonely" at a karaoke competition. The scout asked him to sing "Crying." He nailed it, and the company hired him on the spot.

  Ken is always comparing taxidermy to karaoke; he is equally talented at both forms of mimicry. In fact, he is so good that his male rivals often try to get him disqualified from karaoke competitions because they claim he's a professional. Women swoon when they hear his imitation of Ian Gillian from Deep Purple. He's won several competitions with "Dream On" by Aerosmith because his voice can reach its super-high refrain: "Dream on, dream on, dream on." But his Roy Orbison is extraordinary.

  Orbison was the crooner of all crooners. His falsetto was as distinctive as Irish elk antlers. His lonesome ballads pierce your heart with a tenderness and longing that would be utter camp if it weren't so genuine. The Beatles idolized Orbison. So did Bruce Springsteen. During his life, Orbison suffered several personal tragedies, so he knew a thing or two about loss—about people who vanish and don't come back. "They asked Roy Orbison how he wanted to be remembered, and he said, 'I just want to be remembered,'" Ken told me.

  One night Ken, Colette, and I piled into Colette's pickup and went to a bar. It was in Stony Plain, thirty miles east of Alberta Beach, a place called the Stony Plain Hotel. Colette was meeting some friends here. It was cold and icy—an ordinary mid-February night in Alberta. We wore jeans and sweaters and heavy snow boots. A yellow sign outside said KARAOKE. We walked inside. There was a long wooden bar already decorated with shamrocks for St. Patrick's Day. Albertans with muttonchops and cowboy hats or wearing black leather pants and T-shirts sat at tables loaded with pitchers of Labatt's. The beer was cheap. Everyone was smoking.

  Colette's friends were chatty and laid-back. Two of the women had been best friends since they were eight; they'd vowed to marry brothers one day, and they had. The brothers sat next to their wives, drinking beer. Karaoke started at 10:30. We sat down and ordered a pitcher. Ken looked preoccupied, as if it were a distraction to be here tonight when the World Show was only weeks away. But it was evident that he was going to sing.

  He flipped through a binder of titles; there were thousands of songs. I wondered which one he'd choose. Then the MC, a skinny rocker with a beard and long black hair, walked onto the linoleum dance floor, turned on the teleprompter, grabbed the mike, and led off with "Lay Your Hands on Me" by Bon Jovi. He flailed his head this way and that, his long black hair slashing the air like a cat-o'-nine-tails. When he finished, an attractive blond woman sang "Like a Little Prayer" by Madonna in a voice so angelic and calm it was comforting.

  At the Stony Plain Hotel, people could momentarily escape the isolation of winter in Alberta, with its off-season poverty and alcoholism. Here it was possible to imagine yourself a star in Montreal or Vancouver. That is, unless you struck up a conversation with one of Colette's friends, Pete. He wasn't moved by "Bon Jovi" or "Madonna." He preferred to talk about Alberta.

  "Is Alberta beef on the menus in New York?" he asked me. I had not heard of it. "While you're in Alberta, have a prime rib or a T-bone," he advised. "It's ultimate. It's fine, not a coarse meat. Have a charbroiled beefsteak. And you've got to ride a mechanical bull. The women love it! Go to the Cook County Saloon. There's also one at Cowboys." Pete talked and talked. He talked through Shirley's rendition of "You Sexy Thing." He talked while Shirley's boyfriend belted out "Brick House." "D'ya eat buffalo yet?" he asked. I shook my head. Then: "Men are really men here. They aren't sly dogs like in Toronto and the States. Hardworking. Driven. Rednecks, but tolerant. Strong, too."

  Finally, it was Ken's turn. He got up on the dance floor and grabbed the mike. He stood far from the teleprompter and began to sing. It was an old rock classic by Stealers Wheel, "Stuck in the Middle." I hadn't heard the song in years; listening to it now made me feel nostalgic. "Well you started with nothing and you're a self-made man," he sang, holding his hand out by his side for ballast. His voice was rich and even-toned and had the unmistakable high tenor of Roy Orbison. It was thrilling to hear it. When Ken was finished, everyone applauded. He nodded and sat back down as "Axl Rose" took the mike and sang, "I used to love her, but I had to kill her."

  "After I won my first Best of Show, no one ever treated me the same," he said, reaching for the binder. He flicked through the pages. The song lyrics were in plastic sleeves so they wouldn't get beer stained. I yearned for Roy Orbison, one of his lonesome ballads: "Crying" or "Blue Bayou." Orbison seemed like the perfect singer for Ken to imitate because of the daunting challenge: few can knock off Orbison's three-octave range. The MC said, "Ken's going to kick us up with some good old classics. I haven't had this tune in years. 'Come a Little Bit Closer' by Jay and the Americans."

  It would drive a person crazy to name every animal species that has vanished from the earth. The number is incomprehensible and rises daily. The 2006 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity reported that species are going extinct at a rate one thousand times faster than in the past. The Audubon Society's WatchList of threatened birds now includes 214 species, a 10 percent increase from 2002. The New York T
imes reports that 40 percent of all mammal species in China are endangered: pollution, hunting, and uncontrolled development are decimating them. The world's last two Yangtze giant soft-shell turtles—the largest known freshwater turtles—are unlikely to mate: these two symbols of health and longevity, ages eighty and one hundred, live in separate zoos. Cuvier the catastrophist was prophetic, yet who could have predicted the global meltdown that is defrosting the polar ice caps, scorching Arizona, and flooding New Orleans?

  When I thought about Ken's endeavor to breathe life into an Irish elk, it seemed profound and important. This didn't make me happy; it filled me with dread. Taxidermy has come full circle. As more and more species become extinct due to global warming and other human factors, dioramas, sadly, have regained their original purpose: to freeze nature in its most glorious moments for a public that yearns for it yet is watching it disappear. Perhaps in the future, taxidermy will be mostly recreations—re-creations of animals that have perished because of man.

  As Ken drove me to the airport, I felt sad for all the taxidermists, from William Hornaday on down, who had something to offer science but who had to compete in shows for recognition. Ken called it credibility. You could also call it dignity.

  9. I STUFF A SQUIRREL

  FOR A LONG TIME, I had been thinking about attempting a mount. Next to competing, Ken Walker said the best way to learn is to actually preserve something, so one day I decided to roll up my sleeves and get my hands bloody.