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

in a bamboo forest. When the bull charged, his gun jammed. He escaped with (relatively) minor injuries: a broken nose, swollen eyes, cracked ribs, punctured lungs, and a torn cheek that hung off his face, exposing his teeth. Only an elephant charge could pry Akeley off the trail. He spent weeks on a camp cot recuperating, his bandaged head making him look like a mummy with eye slots. While he healed, however, the driving forces that gave meaning to his life crystallized into a plan that would consume him for the rest of his days.

He would re-create Africa in Central Park, of all places, to prove that the Dark Continent was actually flooded with sunlight. He would do this not by satisfying the public's urge for sensation, but by crafting forty flawless dioramas, each a sincere and scientifically faithful record of the beautiful creatures as Akeley himself had come to know them: in the jungle, at peace. After all, as he put it, "Why in hell should a good sculptor waste his talents on reproducing a lie?"

The work was backbreaking. So was the pressure to record the scene before the animals became extinct and their virgin habitats were trampled. Already the last quagga (an extinct zebralike quadruped) had been wiped out. Akeley figured he had twenty-five years to collect the specimens; it was, as he used to say, "now or never."

So there was the matter of time. More so, there was the matter of Akeley, an uncompromising nature freak. He was restless, impatient, eager to move from one challenge to the next, a man with a furious temper who laid into anyone not as exacting as he, but whose stern expression melted away at night in his studio with friends. In the archives, I found a memo in which someone suggests that Akeley—who was short an antelope bull for the hall—take the skins of two females and transform them into a single male. Akeley flew into a rage, tearing into the person who dared him to cheat nature. Painstaking perfectionism, of course, can drive those in charge of budgets and deadlines—namely, museum administrators—nuts, and in the end Akeley's crowning achievement may have been that the museum shared his indomitable vision and left him alone.

In 1912, the president of the AMNH was Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, a paleontologist who founded the museum's Department of Vertebrate Paleontology. When Akeley presented Osborn and the trustees with his sketch of African Hall, they immediately accepted it. The museum already had an Africa hall, essentially a trophy room. This was a bit more ambitious. Yet countless delays put construction on hold for the next thirteen years, during which time Akeley preserved his elephants, dreaming of Africa.

In her fascinating memoir The Wilderness Lives Again, Akeley's widow, the mountaineer Mary Jobe Akeley, describes his process of collecting, skinning, tanning, and mounting a single elephant (thirteen pages of tight prose, which, incidentally, matches up with what Hornof, Quinn, and the conservators discovered with their x-rays). Basically, this is what he did. After the elephant was shot in the bush, he shaded it under a tarp to slow it from decomposing. After he photographed it for reference, he took detailed measurements with a tape measure and calipers, compensating for variations that make a dead animal different from a living one, such as deflated lungs, a limp trunk, and flaccid muscles. Next he cast the skull and leg bones in plaster and made a death mask of the face to capture its fine musculature. Without this data, the animal would have been a trophy (a generalization); Akeley's elephant would be an exact duplicate.

Properly skinning an animal is incredibly difficult, particularly in primitive conditions. Akeley skinned animals like a Park Avenue plastic surgeon. All his incisions minimized future seams, so they'd disappear when the animal was assembled later. The legs were cut on the inside; the back was cut longitudinally along the spine; the head was cast, cut off. Once skinned, the elephant was fleshed, a far more grueling task. It took Akeley and his team of porters four to five days to remove and prepare the thick, two-thousand-pound hide, using small knives so that they would not mar the skin. When the salted skin arrived in the museum workshop, it was hard and stiff and had to be tanned—a twelve-week process of daily turning to achieve optimum suppleness. (Mary Jobe Akeley said that her husband's tanning formula—undisclosed—was so good that he never lost a wrinkle, a wart, or a tick hole.) Eventually, the two-and-a-half-inch-thick hide was reduced to a quarter inch of leather (soft as a glove) and was ready for mounting.

Akeley always made a miniature clay model of every animal as a guide. Then he outlined the elephant's body on the floor in chalk and built its internal scaffolding on top of that, starting with a steel backbone, neck, and legs and working outward. Eventually, he had an armature made of steel, wood, and the elephant's own bones, which he covered with wire mesh and three inches of clay to mimic its muscles. He placed the tanned skin over the clay muscles, manipulating every fold and wrinkle until it looked like a real elephant. Then he cast the form in plaster to make his manikin. There's actually a whole lot more to it than that, and when you consider that, for instance, a hairless black rhino is nothing at all like an eighteen-foot giraffe or a fleshy-faced gorilla and that each one requires specific anatomical knowledge and reference (which, of course, had to be personally obtained in the field), you can get a sense of who Akeley was: by his own definition, "a fool."

It's a good thing we have fools, however, because a person would have to be incredibly passionate about something to keep it alive for thirteen years of setbacks. From 1912, when the plan was accepted, until 1925, when it was a reality, Akeley got divorced, suffered from depression, mourned the death of Theodore Roosevelt, and served