Still Life by Melissa Milgrom (thriller books to read .TXT) 📗

sold for bases. All around us, drivers were carrying odd-shaped bundles. Talons, claws, and webbed feet poked out of blankets and garbage bags that had been cut and taped to accommodate the peculiar forms.

Hatfield swung open the trailer doors and stepped inside. Leaning against the walls like furniture in a U-Haul was a herd of western origin: a buffalo, two six-point elk, and a large mule deer—deliveries for the way home. "Those are elk legs that go to another guy," he said, pointing to a pair of detached limbs. "It'll be a lamp." In the middle of the truck was an enormous mass covered by a blanket. Ray heaved off the blanket, and there sat his monstrous Barbary lion: a mature male with yellow eyes, a grandiose mane that extended down over its belly, and an upright tail exposing a painstakingly crafted hairy scrotum. The species no longer exists in the wild. An Ohio zookeeper had sold the lion to Hatfield for $8,000 after it had died of natural causes. "I've done about eighty lions, and this is by far the largest," he said with the same nonchalance he had displayed while blow-drying the snow leopard. After the show, the lion was going to the collector who had bought it for $20,700. He paused, considering how to haul this king of beasts to the hotel ballroom where the competition was being held. Even without its artificial sandstone outcrop, the lion was far too big to wheel in on a luggage rack.

Outside the ballroom was the grooming area. Here, in a wide corridor, competitors frenetically combed, fluffed, and beautified their mounts before taking them inside for judging. For the most part the human:animal ratio was 1:1. But there was also Cally Morris's flock of turkeys. According to the World Show brochure, Morris is a renowned "turkey man" whose turkey-mounting seminars are standing room only. Hazel Creek, his studio in Green Castle, Missouri, mounts eight hundred turkeys a year for international clients (turkey hunters mostly). A former world champ, Morris won Best in World Bird in 1997 with a turkey and has taken numerous other awards since. Here he was competing with five eastern wild turkeys in their late-winter plumage. The gobblers strutted down a leaf-strewn trail. "This one right here is about to get his rear end kicked," someone pointed out. Everyone agreed that the turkeys—with their white crowns, obscene red wattles, and retractable snood covers—were exceptionally handsome. Equally striking were Morris's grooming crew. The young men in baseball caps and matching denim shirts preened the gobblers with oversize tweezers until each plume lay perfectly atop the one beneath it. As a finishing touch, one worker grabbed a feather duster (of all things!) and brushed the birds off.

While the turkey mounters exemplify the high level of obscure expertise some taxidermists bring here, the deer-head guys represent the most popular category, because theirs is the most hunted animal in the United States. And like the turkey guys, the deer-head guys had their own obsessive preshow rituals. Darrick Bantley, for instance, a twenty-three-year-old taxidermist from Ebensburg, Pennsylvania, was spraying compressed air onto the glass eyes of his one-and-a-half-year-old whitetail mount. "A live animal doesn't have dirt on its eyes," Darrick's father, Dan, explained. Dan Bantley, a round-faced, round-bellied man with lank silver hair and a mustache, was founder and president of the Pennsylvania Institute of Taxidermy and host of a taxidermy show on cable TV. This week he was scheduled to lead the financial seminar "Business: The Lifeblood of a Studio." He was also on hand for some impromptu coaching of his son, which, at the World Show, means ensuring that every anatomical feature—from veining to pupils—is impeccable. Poses, he said, should reflect "the nuance of nature, not the hand of man." Darrick's young buck, for instance, appeared to be "fleh-mening"—that is, it was eager to mate. Its upper lip was curled, and the glands inside its nose were visibly aroused by the scent of estrogen. The deer resembled a snorting, rearing horse on a merry-go-round. Someone at the show said that "antler-fixated" taxidermists sculpt mounts in their own image, and one had to wonder what inspired this particular one.

Darrick bent down and with ophthalmological precision shined his penlight onto the buck's glass eyes. Dust-free. Nearly every participant had such a light with which to inspect his mounts for flaws. While Darrick was examining the deer's nictitating membrane, or third eyelid (a transparent inner eyelid), Dan recited what I came to consider the World Show's unofficial motto: "First comes anatomical accuracy, then art."

Nearby, a sixty-two-year-old cattle-brand inspector from Texas considered his mount: a longhorn calf eyeball-to-eyeball with a writhing rattlesnake, barbed wire, and a sign that said I'M WARNING YOU. "I was just going to have his mouth open saying 'I'm gonna get you,' but I didn't think it was appropriate with a little calf like this." A woman from Ontario, Canada, gave her two mating bighorn sheep the once-over. "He's romancing her, to say it politely," she said, smiling with satisfaction.

When Ken Walker and John Matthews, two taxidermists from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, walked in, everyone set down the feather dusters and penlights and looked up, dumbstruck. The Smithsonian taxidermists brought integrity to the show. They brought respect to taxidermy. But that's not why everyone paused mid-groom. The two men were carrying a life-size giant panda!

"I've shot bigger pandas than this!" someone joked from the crowd. It was Dan Bantley walking over for a closer look. Only about sixteen hundred giant pandas still exist. Killing one for any reason is almost treasonous (the punishment for poaching a panda in China is ten years in prison), but that doesn't deter everyone. Black-market panda skins can fetch $100,000 to $300,000 apiece. For all these reasons, everyone gazed at the animal until they realized that this panda wasn't a panda. It was another entry in the Re-Creations category.

That was obvious because the person who had created the panda was