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

the two-time world champion, Ken Roy Walker. If you had to choose a taxidermist who epitomizes the spirit of the WTC, it would be Walker. Although he's a fierce competitor, his unapologetic love of taxidermy, his good-natured spirit, and his ability to inspire others make him a celebrity in the field. Not to mention his uncanny gift for sculpture. Whenever anyone in taxidermy speculates about who will be the next Carl Akeley—which is to say all taxidermists, all the time—Walker's name usually comes up.

Walker is forty-eight and lives with his family in Alberta Beach, Canada, a small vacation town situated on Lac Ste. Anne, about an hour northwest of Edmonton, the city where he grew up. He is handsome in a rugged, Burt Reynolds kind of way. He's about six feet tall and has bright blue eyes, thick bristly brown hair, and a matching Vandyke beard. There's something of the bearcat in him—the directness of someone who trusts his own instincts. Walker has a big, friendly smile and tends to disarm people with his impromptu impersonations of Bugs Bunny and Kermit the Frog. He also enjoys bragging, in a gently provoking way, that he is among the politically incorrect. Because of this, he never seems pretentious, even when he's promoting himself—something he admits he does quite flagrantly. How else do you become famous as a taxidermist?

If you said Walker's passion for taxidermy borders on the fanatical, you'd be right. He's been this way ever since he was a kid. Even if you find taxidermy bizarre, you have to admire his willingness to sacrifice everything—except his independence—for the profession. Before one World Show ends, he's already gearing up for the next one. At the last WTC, for instance, Walker took third place in Re-Creations with a saber-toothed tiger. The winner was a Labrador duck. "I stood in front of that duck and said, 'What could beat that duck?'" he told me. "I was strategizing. A panda could beat the duck. I didn't want to make American Beauty. I wanted to make Jurassic Park!" Sometimes other taxidermists are jealous of him. They think it's unfair that he's able to spend weeks and weeks on a single mount, when they have to take on commercial jobs for the money. He tells them, "I'm not here to beat you. I'm here to beat the winner."

Like most exceptionally curious people, Walker can talk endlessly about topics he finds captivating. He's been exasperating people with his passions ever since he was a boy. "When he was dedicated to something, that was his life," his mother, Patsy Walker, told me at the next World Show. "He'd just keep adding on." When he was four, for instance, he held the dry-cleaning man captive in the doorway, reciting an entire dinosaur encyclopedia verbatim. "You better take that kid somewhere—there's something wrong with him!" the man told Patsy. Another time, Patsy had to rescue Aunt Pauline when Walker, who had just learned how to fish, showed up at Pauline's house insatiably curious about bullheads. "Is he pestering you?" Patsy gingerly asked Pauline. "No," she demurred, "but all his wheels are turning." Of course, those incidents were nothing compared to the time five-year-old Ken visited Aunt Mary's house with his pet frog. Mary was sunbathing in a bikini. The frog leaped out of Ken's hands and landed in Mary's bikini top. The top fell down, she went nuts (her boobs were flopping all around), and Ken burst into tears, hysterically crying, "Don't kill my frog, Aunt Mary!"

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