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

Like a coach, he spoke in platitudes:

"Procrastination is justification for failure."

"You have no control over your competition."

"A piece is never finished—you can groom it until all the hair's gone."

"I strive for the artistic over the technical, but you're looking for the perfect marriage of both."

"A judge spends on average [of] ten minutes for each bird, and you spent an entire year."

"I've never mounted a piece for a judge in my life. I mount everything for myself."

The crowd was writing furiously. "To win at the highest level, you want to make your own jaw sets," he said, holding polyurethane cougar fangs in his right hand and fake bobcat teeth in his left. With snarling jaws in each of his hands and, of course, his own straight white teeth, he resembled a three-headed demon casting an evil spell. His next topic was how to soak, freeze, cast, and pickle tongues. "There's nothing worse than paint on a tongue," he said. "I feel like I can taste it."

As he finished, the elevator across the hall opened to let someone off. Inside, Ray Hatfield was riding down to the ballroom. He raised a friendly hand. Next to him, on a brass baggage cart, was his radiant snow leopard.

The World Show is not a survival-of-the-fittest event, but something of a twisted 4-H fair, where teams of scrutinizing judges holding dental mirrors and penlights examine mounts from nearly every phylum and order for anatomical accuracy and artistic merit. Using an official score sheet—a checklist, really—of competition criteria, they determine a total score. The life-size mammal score sheet, for instance, has 139 items, including correct use of paint for nose interior; appearance of seams; cleanliness (bloodstains); odor (strong animal smell or "raw" rancid smell); fullness of lips; tail area (sex organ); and inner ear anatomy. Twelve Best in World titles and numerous first-, second-, and third-place ribbons are awarded during the show. Anyone from its four divisions (Master, Professional, Novice, and Freeze-Dry) can win the Carl E. Akeley Award. Though named for the most famous taxidermist ever, the prize has the less lofty purpose of proving that "taxidermy is indeed a valid form of wildlife art."

It was six P.M. Wednesday, the start of the competition. When I entered the ballroom, an official manning the door eyed me suspiciously, until he noticed my shiny black staff badge (given to me by the show's promoters) and motioned me in. To the right, an entire wall was covered with deer heads—facing up, down, and all around (each one subtly different, but they all looked the same to me). To the left, nothing but porcelaneous fishes. Throughout the ballroom, hundreds of mounts jockeyed for position under glimmering chandeliers. A quick scan revealed Hatfield's monstrous lion; Cally Morris's gobblers; an Alaskan lynx; a muskrat and a green sandpiper pondside; a Gaboon viper with a tarantula and scorpion; a snow-covered snarling coyote; a porcupine climbing up a frost-covered tree; and, over in Re-Creations, Walker's fake panda. Although the black-footed ferret and the ring-tailed lemur are officially considered endangered, nothing, I was told over and over, was poached or smuggled. "You get caught, you're dead meat," said one official.

Farther inside, a lime green chameleon snared beetles with its long translucent tongue, and three crows happily roosted in a pumpkin patch. A garish pink tongue the size of a tube of toothpaste emerged from the woolly face of a bison. The bison was attempting to lick its own nose, a naturalistic moment that caught the judges' attention. "I love the tongue! It's awesome," enthused mammal judge Wendy Christensen-Senk, a taxidermist with the Milwaukee Public Museum. "Look at that tongue!" crowed another judge. The chameleons inspired similar remarks. Although the judging had just begun, I could tell the bison was a top contender.

Each mount was like a song by an enthusiastic, if sometimes off-key, singer. Walker compared taxidermy to karaoke, and when you think about it he's right: each animal was some taxidermist's passionate attempt at mimicry. The hooded crow perched on a gargoyle of Charles Darwin was a British taxidermist's ode to evolutionary science. An Osceola turkey in the snapping jaws of an alligator depicted a rare scene from Florida's swamps. Some mounts were weird stabs at humor: for example, two mandarin ducks with a plaque (engraved!) that said you the man. More bizarre still were the truncated beasts. The howling coyote with a mini-World Trade Center wreckage built into its eviscerated furry torso was especially confounding. Bearing the title Predator Who Survives, the coyote had been sawed in half and turned into a shrine.

Several mounts entered by foreign participants were like national anthems. The Russian competing with a Siberian sturgeon was one case in point. But no mount evoked its country of origin as distinctly as a Swiss participant's minnow-size fish. With chronographic precision, the display—an aquarium lit with high-tech fiber optics disguised as aquatic plants—was accompanied by a thick binder documenting the laborious process of how one transforms a real fish into an exact replica. I couldn't help but wonder just how long it would take this exhibitor to tackle, say, a whale shark.

Although everyjudge knew certain basics (bobcats attack from the ground, leopards from high up in trees), some mounts required more specialized knowledge. And for these, Christensen-Senk had her own reference files. At one point, she grabbed a photo of a groundhog and was able to bust a participant who was attempting to pass off a porcupine made from a groundhog manikin. (Porcupines have super-long quills, which can hide imperfections. Christensen-Senk noticed the flawed profile in a nanosecond.) Sniffing the ibex while running her hands up and down its furry frame, she said, "It smells like an ibex. I like the pose, but it's a commercially available pose." She held the participants to rigid standards, knowing which parts were purchased and which hand-cast. Nearby, John Matthews, from the Smithsonian, shined his flashlight down a white-tailed deer's throat and said, "Look how bumpy it