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

that Waterton made it really confusing. Even his admirers had no idea what he meant by names such as Hannaquoi, Camoudi, Salempenta, or Coulacanara, each of which might refer to a bird, a plant, or a snake.

The Nondescript was even more perplexing. It was a hairy little mannish ape that Waterton said he had procured in Guiana while hunting for specimens. The problem was that it was just a head. Waterton had discarded the body in the jungle (too heavy to carry), making it impossible to identify the riveting new species. Eventually, he admitted making the Nondescript out of two red howler monkeys that he had manipulated to resemble a particular customs official. In the meantime, however, he used a picture of the Nondescript as the frontispiece of Wanderings, creating a buzz that kept the book in print for fifty years.

Waterton really liked only his own taxidermy, claiming that all other specimens were "wrong at every point." He refused to show any mount at his museum that he deemed inexact and unfaithful—which is another way of saying that he displayed only his own mounts. He snubbed every grand exposition.

That said, he was a good taxidermist—perhaps too good, for his taxidermy innovations, as heartfelt as complimentary nomenclature, were too tedious to spawn any followers. For Waterton, every feather, every strand of hair needed tending, a monotony for which he alone had the patience. His method for preserving quadrupeds for natural history cabinets was torturous. First he removed every claw and bone. Then he peeled off the entire skin and pared it down with a knife until it was paper-thin. Even the ears had to be split (inner and outer parts), treated, and seamlessly reassembled. He dispensed with all internal wires when mounting birds and used the treated skin alone, instead of the rag-and-sawdust method. He renounced arsenic. To anyone who found these methods mind-numbing, Waterton quoted Horace: "By laboring to be brief you become obscure." He obviously knew what he was doing, because nearly all his mounts, including the Nondescript (now at the Wakefield Museum), have survived, unlike his wearisome methods. A person would have to be insanely obsessed to actually rebuild a bird feather by feather. Yet in this, Waterman reminds me a lot of Emily Mayer.

Mayer is still racing around her house, putting clipboards, programs, and death masks and agendas into a box to take to the conference. I ask her what she is entering into the competition. "A dog in a suitcase," she says matter-of-factly.

She isn't joking. She explains with a steely empathy how over the years, she's seen plenty of dogs in suitcases. Someone's dog dies, and the owner, who has a parental attachment to the animal, can't bear to part with it. So the dog gets enshrined in a suitcase and is dropped off at the vet's with Mayer's phone number on it. Mayer's entry is a tiny erosion-molded terrier with closed eyes, set snugly in a small suitcase—an open casket of sorts. She calls the piece Last Journey, Precious Cargo.

Mayer joined the guild when she was nineteen and hardly misses a conference. This is her first one as chair, and I'm curious to see her in that role. A death-fixated anti-taxidermist who calls taxidermy "contrived" and "tedious" seems like the wrong person to lead the guild.

Mayer being Mayer, she has no intention of letting anyone call her "chair." Right after she accepted the post, she had a letter published in the guild journal renouncing the term. "I am two-legged and warm-blooded not four-legged and wooden," she explained. She also rejected "Chair Person" ("I deplore this kind of P.C."), and "Madam Chair" ("smacks of grey hair and tweeds"). "We are all of mankind so chairman is fine thank you. Chairbitch is OK too." This was Mayer's acceptance speech.

The two-hour drive from Mayer's house to Nottingham has innumerable roundabouts and T junctions; it's like driving a maze. Even so, Mayer can steer, smoke, and answer calls from Hirst's company, Science, simultaneously. Still, I keep thinking about an article I just read by a taxidermist who warned, "It is a known fact that when a taxidermist is driving a car at speeds of 50 mph-plus, the car often lurches to an abrupt and inexplicable halt. He then rushes from the car, sometimes running back 200 yards or more at high speed, and returns holding a dead bird." Luckily, we don't stop for roadkill and reach the Sutton Bonington campus at 4:30 P.M.

We check into a dormitory, which is next to the lecture hall where the conference is being held. I haven't stayed in a dorm since college, and I'm surprised by the musty smell and the grim sparseness of my room, with its faded curtains and bedspread and its fluorescent lights. On the bed is the room's single amenity, a disposable paper bathmat I'm supposed to bring to and from the showers—the communal block of showers I'll be sharing with forty British taxidermists for the next three days. Watching the small bed sink under the weight of my carry-on bag makes me long for the Crowne Plaza in Springfield, Illinois, with its sparkle and glitz, where the bathroom was mine alone and the closet could accommodate my evening gown.

We unpack and cut through the ivy-covered brick campus to register for the conference. I glance around for people carting stuffed pumas or grizzly bears, or perhaps an alligator packed in fake water. There isn't a hedgehog, a rook, or a stoat in sight. I think we are in the wrong place. Then Mayer leads me inside, where a disheveled man with the gruff, boisterous voice of a pirate (and the broken teeth and scraggly red beard to match) sits in a quiet hallway registering a woman's "bits and pieces" (a hare and a buzzard) into the juried competition. The man's name is Kim McDonald, and he is the guild's legal expert, the person whom Mayer relies on when she needs to know the legal status of, say,