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

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 for 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