Still Life by Melissa Milgrom (best ebook reader TXT) 📕

heart beat. You can almost see the spark of life, and it's a gift to bring the spark of life back," he said. "As a taxidermist who can do his job, I'm indispensable. But as an individual, I'm going to do it my way." He paused and then said, "Some people fit into history nicely. Others have to bully their way in."

At the time, Walker was three months into a nine-month contract at the Smithsonian, which was erecting a new mammal hall and had to hire independent taxidermists because it had closed its taxidermy workshop in the late 1960s. Before he'd left for the museum, however, Walker, who had never seen a real giant panda, had begun to make a fake one. Not a run-of-the-mill forgery, but a panda so convincingly real that you could almost hear its heart beat.

The first step had been finding suitable skins. "I was a bear-hunting guide, an outfitter, for ten years, so I have plenty of hides in the freezer, but I didn't have the right brown ones," he said, explaining that he needed two black bear skins for the job. Black bears can range in color from blond to brown to black. Ken needed two brown-colored bears in their blond phase. That means that the fur appears brown but is actually blond at the roots. "I needed the bear to be shot on September tenth, so its hair wouldn't be too long," he explained. "If you tell people that, you can usually get one in a week," he added in the same dispassionate tone you'd use to order a mobile phone. I stared at him, perplexed, and he softened and said, "When I'm driving, I'll swerve in the street to miss a frog, but I'm by no means a bunny hunter." (A "bunny hunter" is the hunting equivalent of a "Sunday painter.")

When Walker arrived at the Smithsonian, he had access to unbelievable reference: the frozen carcass of Hsing-Hsing, one of the two pandas Mao Zedong gave President Richard Nixon on his historic visit to China in 1972. (Nixon gave China a pair of muskoxen in return.) Hsing-Hsing had died at the National Zoo in 1999, and the museum had acquired his carcass, storing it in three parts: the carcass, the cape, and the head. "They're afraid to mount it," Walker said, shaking his head with frustration. The museum saw it as a potential political fiasco. Nixon's panda had become a powerful symbol of East-West détente, and no one wanted to offend the Chinese. Somehow, in spite of this, Walker got permission to make a template of it. "You think of the odds," he mused. "There I was with the only panda specimen available, the only fresh reference—meaning carcass—right there in the freezer!"

Much like a forensic scientist outlining a murder victim on a sidewalk, Walker traced Hsing-Hsing's carcass onto paper and used the template to make his own panda's inert body. He bleached the blond bear's cape white using Clairol hair dye, then he cut and sewed it and another cape together. Using a brown bear face as a model, he cast its lips, teeth, ears, and tongue. He reshaped bear claws to use as panda claws, inserting an extra one into each paw to serve as the panda's sixth "false" digit. "Being a visionary taxidermist, I knew what it was going to look like," Walker said with the élan of a champ. "But I had never seen a panda before, and there I was holding one!"

Now, at the competition, Smithsonian lead taxidermist John Matthews (Walker's boss) described "Thing-Thing" to the crowd: "That's a reproduction. Ken made that out of two different black bears, and he put them together. Now he's going to put a whole mess of bamboo trees on the base." Like reporters covering the spectacle this would have been had Thing-Thing been Hsing-Hsing, the taxidermists fired questions at Walker.

"Is it a male or a female?"

"You cannot tell the sex of a panda unless you perform surgery. It's more or less generic," Walker said, boring holes into the platform and planting bamboo.

"I got knocked once for not having nipples on a black-squirrel mount that was peeping into a hollow log," noted Randall Waites as Walker cemented bamboo stalks onto the base, bending one near the panda's mouth so it appeared to be playfully munching. "Which way's the sun shining?" Waites asked as a follow-up, eyeing the bamboo to see if it was bent in the proper direction—that is, oriented properly given the sun's supposed alignment.

Under his grandiose handlebar mustache, Matthews broke into a huge smile. "This is the Super Bowl of taxidermy right here!" he said.

That night Jody Green, a commercial taxidermist who was manning a booth at the taxidermy trade fair, and Dan Bantley sat in the hotel lobby talking shop over a beer. They discussed the ordeal of molding stellar lip lines. They described the limitations of prefabricated deer forms (not enough slack around the neck). Then they analyzed a snapshot of a deer eye, passing it back and forth like a shared cigarette. Exactly where should the eyeball sit in this particular socket? Perhaps it was the beer or the long day of travel, but soon I was bleary-eyed. How much of the eyebrow do you see if the eye is positioned at thirty-three degrees? The questions revealed an aesthetic that favored literal representation, to say the least. I got the impression that if they could outfit a deer with a working heart and lungs, they would. Why not simply go to a forest or drive to Springfield's Henson Robinson Zoo and see the real thing? I wondered. Why kill it just to obsessively bring it back to life?

The moon rose, and a guy walked by with a mute coyote tucked under his arm. Green and Bantley were too engaged to notice. "We're all trying to duplicate nature," said Green.

"You always go back to nature," Bantley agreed.

"We're judging another man's interpretation of nature. My job is to