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

rolling-eyeball sunglasses. The first thing he does is deftly rub clay over the cat's face to flatten its fur. The idea is to capture a fresh imprint of its facial muscles. He says, "The next thing we're going to do is..."

"I'd reposition the lips now," Mayer interjects.

"I'd inject fluid into the eyeballs now," he continues.

He fastens a foam collar around the cat's neck to immobilize it while he skillfully drips plaster onto its face until it resembles a gargoyle.

"Stop it! Don't put any more on!" scolds Mayer.

"He's enjoying himself!" a taxidermist named Colin yells from the back of the auditorium. "No lumps in the plaster!"

"No one makes lumpy plaster but you, Colin!" Mayer shouts back.

"Peter makes lumpy plaster!"

Mayer reaches her finger into a jar of wave-and-groom hairdresser's wax that Summers is using as a separator (to keep the fur from sticking to the plaster) and works a little into her own spikes. Nobody is taking notes.

"I think it's dry," says Colin.

"It's not," insists Summers.

"You're making a mess," says Colin.

"Disaster!" says Summers with resignation. "I don't know what to say except sorry."

After the failed demonstration, Mayer's assistants, Church and Spaul, present slides from the WTC. I'm curious to hear a British perspective on an American show. They deliver.

Church: It's a big show and they take it very seriously. They're great people, but they haven't got a sense of humor, so I wouldn't joke with them.

Spaul: Food is cheap. Taxi's cheap. Go to Wal-Mart. I got really nice jeans for eight dollars. The bar is next to nothing. I gave up drinking for five years until I went there, and then I took it up again.

At the World Show, mammal judges use a checklist of 139 items to score a mount. Here things are far simpler and for a reporter an utter joy. The guild has one criterion for judging mounts: is it an acceptable standard?

Sable: yes.

Zebra: yes.

Sika: no.

In the end, Spaul wins Best Mammal, earning his accreditation (more important than a rosette because he has demonstrated that he can master the techniques established by the guild). Mayer takes second place with the dead terrier. Fishwick's kookaburra wins Best Bird and Best in Show. That night in the cafeteria, Mayer presents the awards in what can only be called a non-ceremony. "Your certificates are over there," she says flatly, pointing to a stack of loose papers. "Otherwise, it would take all night."

After dinner, Mayer says, "Happy drinking. See you at the bar." We all trudge to the bar. I'm starting to wonder whether I should have stayed at Mayer's house and read about taxidermy in the guild journal. As much as I love English beer, I hadn't come here for the pints. I had come to see if I could gain a deeper understanding of why people are drawn to taxidermy. I'm frustrated because the people in this room could provide insight into that question—if they are willing. I'm about to give up when someone points to a table near the bar, where a man with wavy silver hair, a long sharp nose, and piercing blue eyes is sitting nursing a pint. He has on a gray T-shirt and jeans, and in the blue glow of the blue bar, everything about him looks blue, including his skin. His name is David Astley, and he is one of the last living links to British taxidermy's glory days—and my last chance to connect the guild with the past. I grab my notebook, wander over to his table, and tell him about my research. He nods and invites me to sit down.

In the mid-1970s, before he was in the movie The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, about the Sex Pistols, Astley was a taxidermist at Rowland Ward's, the firm established by England's most famous taxidermist (no relation to Henry Ward). Ward's mounted trophies for every elite hunter from Winston Churchill and British royalty to General Francisco Franco and a long list of movie stars. The firm also acted as an agent for museums and rich collectors, procuring polar bears, dugongs, and great auks (real and fake) for their dioramas and trophy rooms. Commercial firms such as Ward's flourished in England at the turn of the twentieth century. After World War I, however, only a few leading firms survived. Restrictions on the wanton slaughter of migratory birds, for instance, were starting to be imposed, feathered millinery was passé, and taxidermy was slumping. Ward's hung on until 1983.

Taxidermists often call Rowland Ward the British Carl Akeley. But if Akeley was Henry David Thoreau, Ward was Stephen King. He loved the sensation of the savage beast. His mounts were purposely terrifying. He had a gift for creating narrative tension by manipulating a predator's whiskers and spreading its paws to make the claws look like they could rip you to shreds. His open-mouthed snarl was peerless. From 1862 to 1890, Ward displayed groups of aggressive deer and leaping tigers (and a leopard poised to maul a dark-skinned toddler) at all the big European expos, where Victorians lined up to be shocked and entertained by his blockbuster thrillers. He died a rich man.

Ward called his London shop his "Zoological Studios" and "Gallery of Natural History." The public preferred "the Jungle." World-famous explorers, travelers, and sportsmen all gathered there to swap tales of stalking African lions or shooting Bengal tigers. In its heyday, Ward's received an order for sixty rhinos, dispatched during a single expedition.

Ward forbade photography in his shop (trade secrets, I assume). His autobiography is incredibly scarce because he published only fifty copies himself. However, Pat Morris, the retired University College London zoologist who would be giving the guild show's closing lecture, spent twenty years gathering materials on Ward, which he wove together in a self-published monograph, Rowland Ward: Taxidermist to the World. And now seated here in the bar is David Astley, an actual former Ward's employee.

In an old portrait, Ward, dressed in a long dark suit coat and holding a craniometer and lion skull, looks professorial: the