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

serious naturalist with stylishly tapered beard and mustache. Ward quit school at fourteen to work at his father's taxidermy firm, mounting bird illustrator John Gould's prized hummingbirds and other famous specimens. At twenty-two, realizing the potential of tabloid taxidermy, he struck out on his own. His first triumph was the McCarte lion, which killed its tamer in 1873. Ward posed it in wounded agony, causing a sensation that would launch his phenomenal career. Other effigy-like things followed. He turned the hooves of Holocaust, the champion racehorse, into inkwells, and rendered Cloister, another racehorse, into a regal trophy head (now at the National Horseracing Museum). London Jack, the dog that collected money for charity at Waterloo station, was, after his death, stuffed and outfitted with baskets to continue his benevolent duty. Lady Flora, the championship shorthorn cow, was a Ward mount, as was Brutus the circus lion; Farthest North, an Eskimo dog Robert E. Peary took on his foot expedition across Greenland; and, of course, the head of Persimmon, King Edward VII's championship racehorse. Business was booming, and England never had to say goodbye.

In spite of the fetishism, Ward was considered a naturalist. These were the days when taxidermy was taxidermy, no matter what one had stuffed. A member of the Zoological Society of London, Ward was granted the royal warrant "Naturalist, by appointment to his Majesty the King," which he used on his trade label to promote himself.

While Ward was establishing himself abroad, his firm was developing a prosperous sideline of animal furnishings. So imaginative was the firm that it is difficult to refrain from describing these accessories now. The firm turned crocodiles into umbrella stands, baby giraffes into high-back chairs (towering), and Siberian tigers into rugs. It made bowls out of lobsters, doorstops out of ostriches, garbage cans out of elephant feet, and inkstands out of rhino horns. Only at Ward's could a person buy "zoological lamps"—kerosene (later electric) lamps made out of eagles, owls, black swans, birds of paradise, and, on occasion, monkeys. Ward's elephant-foot liquor cabinets were especially popular with kings and rich hunters—rivaling even Rowland's brother Edwin's grizzly bear dumbwaiter (an upright grizzly holding a cocktail tray in its paws—an idea that Rowland would claim as his own). No one forged better great auks or dodos than Rowland Ward—or lied about them so convincingly. Surprisingly, the firm continued to turn rhinos and antelopes into ornamental bookends, lamps, and ashtrays up until the mid-1970s.

Ward died in 1912, but his studio thrived until the 1960s, when attitudes toward ecology shifted and orders such as the 365 tigers for His Highness the Maharajah of Cooch Behar dwindled, as did requests for "His" and "Her" elephant heads. When Kenya banned trophy hunting in 1976, the firm was doomed—and so was taxidermy.

By the time Astley arrived at Ward's, the firm—which once mounted lions by painstakingly removing and then implanting each whisker and eyelash individually, by hand—was sending out repair jobs with the glue still wet. Commercial taxidermy is never easy, but at Ward's it was becoming unbearable: low pay, long hours, sagging morale. "I got the sack for refusing to sweep the floor," Astley says, shaking his head. And so in 1983, Ward's shut down for good.

Today it's hard to find a former Ward's employee. Most of the people who worked for the firm are gone. They left no written records of their lives as taxidermists because, as Pat Morris suggests, they didn't think what they had to say about their profession was important. But here is Astley, and opportunity is opportunity, so I ask him to describe Ward's, and he's happy to oblige.

He lifts his head up from his pint, raises an eyebrow, nods, and begins to list several departments as if he's walking through them in his mind: elephant footstools, game heads, finishing work. Then he turns grave. I figure he's trying to retrieve the details; Ward's was, after all, England's most illustrious taxidermy firm. I glance down at my notebook to make sure I have plenty of blank pages. Then Astley starts to roll. He is bright-eyed and animated, a lively storyteller with a deadpan disposition. He speaks quickly, with increasing momentum. I'm not quite following what he's saying, but I write it all down anyhow, thinking it will make sense later, once I've had the chance to research Ward's myself back in the States. Astley launches into a long, discursive story about how the foreman of the big-head section threatened to murder him, as well as something he calls the passenger pigeon caper. (My notes are unintelligible and say only "fifty-pound ransom.") Astley talks and talks, and I scribble and scribble, hoping to uncover something substantial, until I realize that I've been writing for an hour or so about a deaf girl who worked near the Irish floor sweeper because she was immune to his drunken songs and who got too fat for the birdman and ended up dating the foreman of the big-head department, a liar and a petty thief, who soon left—as did Astley—for World of Nature.

As I walk back to my dorm room that night, I feel like a freshman who was just hazed. In the morning, someone pounding on my door jolts me out of a deep sleep. I climb out of bed, dizzy and disheveled, and crack open the door. It's the Chairbitch in her pajamas, a towel slung over her shoulder, heading for a shower with her colleagues. She tosses me my denim jacket (I forgot it at the bar), scrutinizes me, and growls, "Ugh! You look like something from out of a movie." Then she lets out a deep laugh that still haunts me today.

For all its frivolity, the guild show ends on a serious note: a lecture by Pat Morris, the leading authority on British taxidermy and, as it happens, a hedgehog expert.

Morris is tall, with thinning gray-blond hair. He looks stern, but he comes alive when he talks about taxidermy. He knows everything about the subject, and anyone