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

got the perfect specimen [for the hall]," explained Matthews, filing. "At least half [had] had a necropsy [an animal autopsy] done on them when they showed up. All of the internal organs were removed—the eyeballs, brain, thyroid were all removed. They cut off the top of the head to take out the brain. They were cut everywhere—the head, the bottom, the sides—so research scientists could get a life history." Take the gorilla, for example. When it arrived via FedEx, it had no eyelids and was missing a nipple.

It was fascinating to watch the taxidermists transform zoo captives into wild savages. For instance, zoo rodents' overgrown teeth had to be cosmetically trimmed with wire cutters to make them look as if the animals had foraged for food (when in reality they had been served take-out). Clearly, this went beyond creating the illusion of life. Instead, the taxidermists were creating the fantasy of a life never lived.

Taxidermists as a rule dislike fiction, because they believe it's impossible to improve on what nature has already perfected. But sometimes, apparently, you can, and the taxidermists in this lab were doing just that. If William Hornaday, chief taxidermist at the Smithsonian in the 1880s, were here now, he probably would be disgusted by the condition of the skins.

I wonder, though, if he ever encountered the following situations. To transform Behring's galloping oryx into a nursing mother, the taxidermists had to rehydrate and remount the skin, reshape its muscles, and raise its head. The threadbare sable antelope had bald patches on its rib cage, requiring skin grafts, and the immature giraffe needed replacement leg rods. Whereas Theodore Roosevelt's white rhino needed only a simple cleaning, the antique Bengal tiger's stripes had faded and needed to be painted back on with Garnier Nutrisse "Luscious Mango" hair dye. Finally, the fifteen-foot giraffe required a penile implant: twenty-five pounds of clay.

Matthews had to make every blemish disappear before November. The job required thousands of hours of painstaking work and had to be done fast. But how? Akeley had demanded that his taxidermists join his expeditions so they could take scientific measurements in the field. Hornaday had pleaded with museums to reject pelts from donors who did not know how to properly collect them. Matthews hired an Alberta bear hunter who did a mean Roy Orbison imitation.

"They needed me to come down to make forms for skins that were in bad condition," Walker explained. "I can come uncannily close, down to the bump on a Roman nose." He sat hunched over a worktable, darning a bush baby skin. Among taxidermists, Walker is famous for big predators, so I was surprised to see him preserving such a delicate primate. While he drew a threaded needle through the skin, he hummed along with a CD of his brother's bluegrass band, named String 'Em Up, of all things. When he looked up, a big smile spread across his face, and he said, "A song has to sound inspired—whether it is or isn't!"

As it happens, Walker had found his calling after reading My Way of Becoming a Hunter. Robert Rockwell had published the memoir in 1955, when he was seventy, after a tremendous career mounting all kinds of fabulous creatures for all the big museums, including this one. In 1910, after passing the required civil service exam ("highest score"), Rockwell was offered ninety dollars a month ("excellent") by the Smithsonian and took the job—for nine months (just like Walker). His high expectations, however, were dashed when his "pompous" boss, George Turner (another Ward's graduate), had him transform five decomposing fur scraps into a South American spectacled bear. It was "far from a work of art," but it satisfied Turner. Nothing irked Rockwell more than having to perform taxidermic somersaults for a boss who knew nothing about, say, ungulates. "Those who understand animal anatomy know that the rump of a Grevy's zebra is totally different from the horse and even from the Grant, Chapman, and Mountain species of zebra, but Turner was quite unaware of this," Rockwell observed. "I took care that the hindquarters of my full-size clay model were correctly proportioned, but my boss immediately objected. He often did this, and frequently was in the wrong, as a look at the live animal would have shown him."

Rockwell went on to become an exceptionally accomplished museum taxidermist, working on the American Museum of Natural History's Hall of North American Mammals. But he felt stifled at the Smithsonian and said so in his memoir. I read several passages to Walker, who nodded his head in recognition. Then he bagged the bush baby and led me around the workshop. "I put the other taxidermists at ease because I have no political aspirations for this place," he said, and for that reason he made an exceptional guide.

"This is a male lemur, and I had to turn it into a female. I was plucking all the hair off its breast, and I think it shows in its face. There was no form signed on this. It was a forced sex-change operation."

He continued, "We just finished the koala bear. Had to replace its ears. We acquired two extra ears from Australia. I kept the best one to mount and kept the other for spare parts. Of course, I had to ask permission for that."

He pointed to the three-toed sloth. Its claws had spiraled out of control from disuse: "You can tell it's from a zoo. Obviously it's left-handed." Moving on, he said, "I don't know if it's a male or a female wallaby, but I gave it a baby."

He pointed out pages of legal documents and permits that travel with the sea otter because it's highly protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Then he showed me the hippo, made entirely of wax. It sat in a huge wooden crate like a Christmas present in a fairy tale; its gigantic teeth hung down from its gaping mouth—stalactites in a cave. "Died in the National Zoo and