Still Life, Melissa Milgrom [pdf e book reader .TXT] 📗

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 American 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