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

going to stuff one." In fact, she saved that information for both her elementary school teacher and the executive director of the Brooklyn Heights Association, who asked pointedly, "And how do you feel about that?"

Looking back on it now, I realize that I devoted too much energy to studying their behavior and not enough to their anatomy. I could have, for instance, assembled a squirrel skeleton first to see how the thing is constructed. At the time, however, it seemed perfectly reasonable—or, more likely, vainly presumptuous—to simply observe.

To prepare my mind for surgery, I'd walk over to Frank's butcher shop in the Chelsea Market to look at the huge skinned carcasses hanging in the window. Then I'd pore over old taxidermy manuals from the 1800s. Montagu Browne's Practical Taxidermy (originally published in 1878) was the most highly respected in England. In America, Oliver Davie's Methods in the Art of Taxidermy (1894) and William Hornaday's Taxidermy and Zoological Collecting (1891) were considered the best of their era. Both manuals include scientific diagrams and illustrations; the authors' motives were linked more to science than to sport. I bought the Davie book at an antiques shop and read the section on mounting small quadrupeds. But it was Hornaday, whose chapter "Treatment of Skins of Small Mammals" I had photocopied at the AMNH library, who ultimately bolstered my courage. He wrote, "There are few circumstances under which a determined individual finds himself thwarted in his desire to remove and preserve the skin of a dead animal. In nineteen cases out of twenty the result hinges on his disposition. If he is lazy, a thousand things can hinder his purpose; if he is determined, nothing can."

I was determined but squeamish, and I related my fears to the Schwendemans. All David said was, "We have plastic bags in case you have to puke."

***

One day in late November 2003, I stop in at Schwendeman's Taxidermy Studio to see when we will begin. Bruce hands me a plastic bag from Target; inside is a frozen lump, which smells like blood and wet fur. "That's your baby!" he says, smiling. "Tomorrow we'll get the body out." He pauses, looking at me, then quickly adds, "I'll be right here to help you. It might be fun."

Fun is what I feared; nausea is what I expected. Fun would mean I had crossed some unspoken threshold; I had become too immersed in the subject and gone bonkers or lost my journalistic objectivity. Bruce then explains step one: skinning. We'll make a ventral incision from the chest bone to the anus, then skin the squirrel from the posterior end to the head, carefully removing the skin by snipping the membrane that connects it to the muscle, or meat. Eventually, we'll disarticulate (cut the ball from the socket) the hind and front leg bones from the pelvis and shoulder, respectively. Then we'll skin the head and the neck, severing the ear tubes, eyelids, nose, lips, and whisker pads from the facial bones without mangling anything; "split" the lips and eyelids; skin the paw pads; and finally extract the long tailbone from the tail. When we are done, we'll have the raw body with the head attached, skinned. The drama will begin tomorrow morning and take roughly two days.

Now I am truly nervous. Now what I fear is far worse than a bloody dissection: contracting Lyme disease, rabies, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Bang's disease, bubonic plague, ringworm, cat scratch fever, sarcoptic mange, or any number of taxidermy's health hazards. I've read about them in Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, a book about natural history museums. The Carnegie Museum of Natural History's annotated bibliography on taxidermy lists even more hazards, from exposure to toxins in pesticides, insect repellents, and fumigants, to asbestos and arsenic poisoning, parasites, and carcinogens found in formaldehyde and other preservatives. Entry number 681, a bulletin put out by the South African Museums Association in 1980, urges all museum workers to treat every zoological specimen as if it harbored a potential disease. For no physiological reason, I start to feel itchy. I scratch my head. I can't wear my wool hat. As much as I don't want the squirrel to have been killed in vain, I desperately want to back out.

"I'm wearing surgical gloves," I say. David shakes his head and laughs. "Wimp!"

On April 30, 1883, the Society of American Taxidermists assembled in New York City for its third and final exposition. This last gathering featured a model workshop called "A Taxidermist's Sanctum: The Proprietor at Work." Never before could the curious outsider see the macabre tools and strange setting in which the taxidermist, as if by magic, simulated life. The model workshop, a period room of sorts, had this disclaimer: "The taxidermist's shop is for work, and not for visitors, and only the chosen few are admitted to the presence of half-mounted birds and beasts." Things haven't really changed. Most taxidermists—and no museum that I know of—never invite the public to see a mount in progress, because people tend to freak out when they see a dead animal turned inside out, especially if that animal is named Fido or Mittens.

But now, on the day before I am going to skin a squirrel, David, as a rite of passage, wants to take me to the most forbidden place in the workshop: the cellar. More specifically, he wants to show me his macerating bison skull. Bruce forbids him. "It's too smelly!" Bruce insists.

The old man won't budge. "She's got to get used to the smells if she's going to be a tax-i-dermist," he says with the persistence of a badger. "Let's go look at it!"

The banister to the cellar was once the mast of a sailboat. It is bowed and polished smooth. At the bottom of the steps, the rank odor of putrefying bison emanates from a galvanized bathtub. "That's macerating, rotting. It's one of the worst smells you could ever imagine," David says, turning on a faucet to agitate the gamy, tepid water,