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

was mounted by Brown, who was chief taxidermist here until the late 1950s," Walker explained. Apparently, Brown had yearned for it to die so that he could mount it.

Finally, Walker showed me the Patagonian hare, or mara, a creature so implausible it seemed dreamt up by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. Dolichotis patagonum has the front feet of a kangaroo, the back feet of a bird, and the ears of a rabbit; it is classified as a rodent.

Walker led me inside the colder of the two giant industrial freezers, which are alarmed. At eight degrees, it was thirty degrees warmer than Alberta in January, and he said, "This is where I go when I feel homesick." I shivered in my T-shirt and cotton skirt as Walker pointed to a dolphin, a clouded leopard skull, bats, and freezer bags filled with tongues, furry ears, and other extremities. Before he reached for the latch, he motioned to the midsection of what resembled a bloody snowman. It was Hsing-Hsing's torso—minus its pelt. I gagged. Walker's face lit up. He nodded, excitedly, and exclaimed, "That's a panda carcass!" The pelt was finally at the tanner's.

I asked Walker how he liked working at the Smithsonian. He shrugged. "It's credibility in a field where they don't give it," he said. Later, after he left Washington, he was more explicit: "If you are going to survive there, you have to work within that mentality. You get so caught up in people taking credit for this or that accomplishment. If I get recognition, I want it to be real ... The secretary of the Smithsonian knew who I was. But in terms of respectability, the profession has a long way to go."

Later that day, Matthews brought me outside to see Paul Rhymer, who was sandblasting the okapi's manikin. A green face shield protected Rhymer's eyes; he breathed through a respirator while he scarred up the manikin to give it "tooth" so it would hold the precious skin without buckling. "Sanding alone would have been adequate, but we'll never mount another one of these again," he explained. Because supply companies could hope to sell only around a hundred okapi manikins at best, the Smithsonian team had cast a custom form in fiberglass using Akeley's methods. "Originally, we wanted to compete with this in the World Show, but we had so much snow, and John [Matthews] just had his baby," Rhymer said. He lamented his third-place chameleon. "It had wet paint, a fatal flaw. The pink one won," he said, sanding.

At six feet six inches, Rhymer stands above the rest, the other taxidermists joke. Both his father and grandfather worked at the Smithsonian. Mostly this fills him with pride; sometimes, however, I sense that it wasn't always so easy. "As a group, we're a little gun-shy about what people think of taxidermists. The way I survived was by making fun of myself," he said. Indeed, he calls himself "a big, bumbling, sensitive, New Age redneck." In the taxidermy world, Rhymer is, politically speaking, exotic. "I'm left of about ninety percent of taxidermists. John almost thinks I'm a traitor," he said.

He continued, "I've always had a pretty outward claim on my redneck roots. I'm a taxidermist and a good ol' boy, but I was also out on the streets protesting the first Persian Gulf War. I'm pro-gun control, and for a lot of taxidermists, it's all about guns and the NRA [National Rifle Association]. If you don't have a gun, you can't hunt, and if you can't hunt, then you can't have taxidermy. As a consequence, they see conservative politics as their ally, and mostly they are right. I own four guns. I'm okay with handguns, but I don't have one. If my wife wanted one because she didn't feel safe, I wouldn't have a problem with that. But a lot of taxidermists want them. They are very pro-NRA. It is very polarizing, and ninety-nine-point-nine percent of all taxidermists feel very strongly about this. It's not a southern thing. If I depended on deer heads for a living, I might be more ardent, but then I wouldn't be a taxidermist, because that's not my thing. I love the diversity, and birds are my favorite."

The okapi's pose, like every pose in the exhibit, was established by the concept people and architecturally rendered in a book of drawings called the "casebook." (The taxidermists had virtually no role in determining the content or script of the exhibit.) In this display, the okapi's ten-inch tongue would be reaching for a leaf on an artificial tree. "We sewed up the holes, turned up the eyes [and] ears, and made sure everything's fleshed out," said Matthews. "This isn't a fun job. It's hot out."

"That's all done from scratch," said Rhymer, lifting the respirator off his mouth to talk. "The way these muscles stack up in the brisket. The way the collar is shingled with a long cleft down the center."

"That's museum taxidermy!" boasted Matthews.

The okapi took "weeks and weeks and weeks" to preserve, but the most complicated mount in the new mammal hall was the orangutan. That is, the bald orangutan. That is, the ten-foot ape that arrived here from a zoo sans skeleton and carcass—the raw data Matthews desperately needed in order to sculpt an accurate form for the skin. Photographs would not do (two-dimensional; indeterminate scale); these taxidermists needed to wrap a tape measure around the torso and take calipers to the cranium.

If William Hornaday were around, he could have helped. After all, he spent weeks in Borneo, observing, measuring, and skeletonizing orangutans for Tree-Tops. Matthews wasn't leaving Newington for the next four months except to sleep. He had to find the right size orangutan carcass for reference—without whacking one. But where? Suitland, Maryland, it turned out.

Suitland is where the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center (MSC) is located. The MSC is a state-of-the art storage facility; it contains thirty-six million natural history specimens (wet and dry) and collection items, more than any other museum in the