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

taxidermist—so the skin would absorb borax, a preservative used to soak up fat and repel insects. In taxidermy, an animal starts out looking like the animal, gets mangled beyond recognition, and then ends up looking like the animal again. This eagle was mangled beyond recognition. Kurt pointed to a bald patch on its belly where its feathers had been ripped out by a truck, then he extended its long yellow talons. Its purple carcass dangled from a skinning hook near Bruce. A fan sent the stench of rotten meat circling around the humid workshop.

Kurt went over to the skinning hook and took down the carcass. He set it on the worktable, then began cutting into it with poultry shears. It still had the skeleton inside, which seemed odd; I had always thought taxidermists used skeletons as armatures to support the skin, but I was wrong by about three hundred years. In the 1700s, when taxidermy manuals were useful only to specimen collectors who wanted to know how to preserve birds for transport, people did use skeletons as armatures. In fact, they had all kinds of convoluted ways for preserving animals. One of the first people to describe his methods was the French naturalist R.A.F. Réaumur. In 1748, Réaumur offered four ways to preserve birds for travel: he stuffed their skinned bodies with straw, hay, and wood; he soaked them in spirits, then packed them in barrels of oat or barley chaff; he essentially mummified them with preserving powders; and, of course, he baked them. E. Bancroft's method for preserving Guyanese birds for natural history cabinets (1769) resembles a recipe for coq au vin: after he stuffed the skinned birds with salt and alum, he marinated them in rum for two days, then baked them. When death came knocking for George Washington's golden pheasants (a gift from Louis XVI), Charles Willson Peale (portraitist, naturalist, and fossil hunter) desperately wanted the skins for his Repository for Natural Curiosities in Philadelphia. In 1787, he sent Washington these instructions: "If the weather should be warm, be pleased to order the Bowels to be taken out and some Pepper put into the Body, but no Salt which would spoil the feathers." Washington agreed: "He made his Exit yesterday, which enables me to comply with your request much sooner than I wished to do."

Some taxidermists steamed wings, talons, and webbed feet to make them supple. Others coated bodies in liquid varnish or preserved skins with sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride), corrosive sublimate (mercuric chloride), or mixtures of wine, turpentine, and camphor. In 1771, Captain'T. Davies described how he extracted bird tongues, brains, and eyes through the mouths of his eviscerated creatures. Then he stuffed their heads with camphor-soaked cotton and inserted black eyes that he had made from candle wax.

If these methods sound nothing remotely like taxidermy, that's because the first taxidermists were not taxidermists. One of the earliest documented taxidermy collections was preserved in the early 1500s by chemists. A Dutch nobleman's prized cassowaries, which he had brought home from India, suffocated in an overheated aviary (his furnace door had been left open and baked the birds). Distraught, the owner had the leading local chemists devise a method for preserving them. They treated the skins with spices, crudely mounted them using wires, and affixed them to a perch, frozen in time.

For the next three hundred years, the practice of taxidermy was, in a nutshell, a series of attempts to animate nature while preventing it from taking its course. Before arsenical soap was used as an insecticide and preservative, most mounts lasted no more than thirty years before they became moth-eaten or began to decompose. Except for the duchess of Richmond's African grey parrot in Westminster Abbey and George Washington's pheasants at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, few specimens predate the 1830s. This would all change when taxidermists—notoriously secretive—began to divulge their private formulas.

Kurt glanced up. A sly smile spread across his face. He considered the purple carcass. "Wanna sex it?" David, who was sitting in his rocker, snickered. I reached for my car keys.

"Quit showing off!" Bruce shouted. Although he knows that scientific specimens are always identified by their sex, age, and location where they were collected, he wanted me to view taxidermy as dignified and had no patience for taxidermy jokes. "Look at what their [people's] exposure is: Psycho, Jeffrey Dahmer. And all of the horror movies, like Dracula, always have taxidermy on the walls. Disney has a problem with taxidermy. In 101 Dalmatians, taxidermy was evil—they wanted to make a coat out of puppies. Even The Simpsons had a runaway parade float, and someone almost got speared by a mounted swordfish! So it's perpetrated as a weird thing, not necessarily a bad thing, just unusual and creepy."

Taxidermy does have a creepy reputation, but taxidermists can blame only so much of it on Hollywood. Taxidermy was considered shady even in its heyday. In fact, except for five years in the 1880s, when taxidermists banded together to form the Society of American Taxidermists (SAT), the first professional taxidermy association (whose members would eventually revolutionize museum displays), again in 1972, when the National Taxidermists Association was formed (followed by Britain's Guild of Taxidermists and others), taxidermists, who tend to be solitary workers, purposely cut themselves off from the outside world. No other profession has so steadfastly barred visitors from its dreary workshops, a decision that makes sense if you've ever seen someone flesh a bald eagle with tweezers.

Before refrigeration, it was even worse. Back then, taxidermy workshops were vile. Gruesome dissections took place in dark, smelly rooms that were stifling hot in the summer. Arsenic, formalin, carbon tetrachloride, and other dangerous chemicals that taxidermists used as preservatives were stored in open containers and filled the workshops' stagnant air with carcinogenic dust.

That said, the ghastly workshop is only one reason for taxidermy's insularity. The other reason is that taxidermy is an incredibly time-consuming handicraft. Few have ever prospered by stuffing other people's animals. "You don't become rich