Although I love birds, I wanted to mount a mammal—something suitably small and relatively easy, something ubiquitous and easy to observe even in New York City, where wildlife seems incongruous and irrelevant. The animal would have to be legally procured. It would have to have a tough, pliable skin, nothing delicate like a rabbit or with translucent parts like an opossum; nothing with a thick layer of subcutaneous fat like a walrus or with stink glands like a skunk; nothing politically incorrect like a baby seal.
One of the most common mammals in the eastern United States is the eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis), a rodent with a year-and-a-half life span. I wanted to mount one. I wanted to make my own form from scratch using the soft-bodied technique—the method whereby you make an artificial body out of bent wires wound with excelsior (slender wood shavings) and padded with tow (chopped hemp fiber) and cotton. I figured if I could stomach skinning and fleshing, I could mount something. I was less convinced that I could give it the vital spark taxidermists always talk about: the magic part, requiring discipline and obsession and reverential love. Taxidermy's objective is clear yet impossible: to create a counterpart to life itself.
"Bad taxidermy is easy, I grant, but we are not discussing stuffed monstrosities of any kind," William Hornaday wrote in 1883. You have to know everything about an animal to capture its essence in a mount, yet you needn't know a thing about it to detect even a tiny flaw—and everyone knows what squirrels are supposed to look like. I had seen mounts at the World Taxidermy Championships with exposed seams, lopsided ears, or unnaturally angular shoulders; whose eyes were too closely set; whose bodies were truncated or hollowed out into planters or whatever. Whenever I encountered these horrors, I felt deeply disturbed. No wonder people find taxidermy creepy.
You'd think the proliferation of taxidermy schools in America would raise the standards—and they do to a certain extent. However, no formal training has ever been required to become a taxidermist, which adds to its idiosyncratic appeal. All the famous American taxidermists entered the trade circuitously or by apprenticeship. Apprenticeship seemed the most authentic way to go, and for an unskilled, unartistic New Jersey native who fears unleashed dogs, it was truly the only option. However, before I asked the Schwendemans if they would teach me, I considered my alternatives.
I could have enrolled in a taxidermy school. The Academy of Realistic Taxidermy in Havre, Montana, seemed a good choice at the time, but its beginner course required a tetanus shot and eight weeks in a dormitory with a roommate. I could have gone it alone. Darin Flynn's Mounting a Fox Squirrel video, which I had bought at the WTC, was tame enough, but he used a premade foam manikin; I wanted to make mine from scratch, using the method Walker had on the bush baby at the Smithsonian. It was because of him, in fact, that I had bought The Breakthrough Mammal Taxidermy Manual, another false start. It contains a how-to section on small mammals, with photos of flayed squirrels turned inside out like leather gloves. When I saw their sunken eyes and exposed organs, I slammed the book shut and never opened it again.
The Wildlife Artist Supply Company in Monroe, Georgia, sells a prefabricated squirrel-mounting kit specifically for the aspiring taxidermist and a choice of 125 squirrel manikins, each striking a riveting pose: climbing a tree, hanging dead, sitting upright with a nut, barking. The kit costs a reasonable $24.95—a compelling alternative to formal education—but where would I do it? In my parents' garage? In my publisher's conference room?
An apprenticeship seemed the best way to go. I needed mentors, I decided, and when the Schwendemans agreed to teach me, I was overjoyed (and a bit nervous).
Bruce can mount a squirrel in two 14-hour days if he does nothing else, but David insists that when a taxidermist rushes, it will show in his work. "People can erect a shopping center in less time than it takes to mount a deer head," says Bruce. He compares the intricate craft to bookbinding or restoring an old flag; no two mounts are alike. We agreed to pace ourselves and work in discrete phases, and in the end, the squirrel took six months to preserve. "Geez, you had to choose a squirrel," Bruce groaned when I first mentioned the idea. "Why couldn't you choose something easier like a bear? How'd you talk me into this?"
We never discussed when we would start or who would "dispatch" the squirrel—or how. I wasn't in a hurry. I wasn't sure I had the stomach for taxidermy. The tools alone—eyehooks, brain spoons, and toe probes—made me shudder. I could barely watch Julia Child filet a fish on TV. And I certainly wasn't going to shoot anything. For one thing, up until fairly recently, the only trigger I'd ever pulled was at a boardwalk arcade. For another, I have awful eyesight.
Before we began, David urged me to study my specimen, and like all good taxidermists, I started to identify with the species, imbuing squirrels with human characteristics (neurotic little New Yorkers, always impeccably groomed). On my way to work, I observed their nervous, jerky behavior in a lush community garden on Twenty-fifth Street. On my way home, I watched them scamper, then freeze (always clutching a nut, their beady little eyes transfixed) in front of the Clearview Cinema on West Twenty-third Street. At home, I kept my binoculars near the window to watch them race across wires or leap like monkeys from branch to branch. My visits to the American Museum of Natural History become more pointed. In the Hall of North American Mammals, I made my way down a dark corridor to the squirrel diorama to admire their plump, fleshy bodies. I even began to study them in storybooks I read to my daughters. Squirrel Nutkin and his brother Twinkleberry would never hold weight as taxidermic reference at the Smithsonian, but Beatrix Potter's illustrations nicely capture the idiosyncrasies of the species.
My daughters, innocent accomplices, picked up on my interest and began to point out squirrels wherever we went: the playground, the schoolyard, the Halloween parade. The only people who make a concerted effort to watch squirrels in Brooklyn Heights are crazy people on the Promenade. I was paranoid that one of my neighbors would ask why we were so infatuated with squirrels and my older daughter would say, "My mother is 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. "Tom
orrow 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, which makes it even more repulsive.
"You had to stir it up!" Bruce shouts. I retch and gag.
"Oh, you sound like one of my daughters ... and my son!" David howls, grinning. With his knobby hands, he lifts the skull out of the tub. The meat easily peels off the bones. He'll scrape the rest off with a toothbrush. It buoys his spirits.
Bruce shakes his head in disgust and walks over to a big plastic industrial bucket filled with saline pickle for tanning small animals. Tanning breaks down the skin's oils and stiffens its meshed fibers so the hair won't fall out. "That's where your squirrel is going to go after it's skinned," he says. "Smell it! Put your head in there!" Bruce is a big guy with a booming voice. He's not joking.
Reluctantly, in the name of journalism, I lower my face into the blue bucket, my gag amplified in the confined space. At the bottom I see a jackass penguin slated for a touch-me exhibit at Jenkinson's Aquarium in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey. Through several inches of pickle, the penguin looks distended and bloated, as if it had drowned. (It actually died by swallowing its nest material. When it was necropsied, the aquarium found a long stick in its gullet.) The penguin smells less rancid, more fishy and pungent, than the bison skull, but I gag again.
An animal can last in pickle indefinitely. The Schwendemans once pickled a porcupine for twenty-two years. This penguin's been in pickle for a month or so, which is average. Tomorrow Bruce will mix three gallons of fresh pickle using a secret family recipe.
"While you're used to the smells, I'll show you the freezer," Bruce says, and we trudge through the basement, which is strewn with coarse salt, to the walk-in industrial freezer. It is so crammed with bagged carcasses—some have been in there for years—that (thankfully) there's no room for us (although Bruce does keep an ax inside in case he gets trapped). The furry arm of a four-hundred-pound black bear dangles from a garbage bag; its long claws are as sharp as knives. The bear is already fleshed and salted (salt inhibits bacterial growth, which would make the hair loose). It's too large to tan here, so Bruce will ship it to a California tannery in a leakproof UPS box marked GREEN SALTED HIDES. Tracking a bear—or any specimen, for that matter—is complicated and requires special permits and tags. Every animal in the shop, including my squirrel, is tagged and numbered. This bear's ears were tagged by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at a weigh station during New Jersey's recent bear hunt. To track the bear further, its lips are tattooed and its skin is punched and coded with an awl. If one skin gets mixed up with another skin, federal authorities could potentially close down the shop.
The basement is crammed with dusty deer heads, heaps of caribou and moose antlers, tanning drums, rusty tools, jars of sand, artificial snow, mica for bases, various bones and teeth, driftwood, aquarium stones, seashells, stoneware crocks, and galvanized tubs. There is a darkroom, where two polyester lamprey eels are posed mating. Past a pile of old patterns from which Mum-Mum made ear liners is a shooting range where local hunters and Milltown police officers used to shoot for target. It's coated with dust, but I can make out the rusted iron stars clothespinned to a wire, which we follow to a back wall that is pitted with bullet holes. A sign says:
SHOOT AT YOUR OWN RISK
Range Prices
.2 cents per shot rifle
.2 cents shot pistol, includes ammo
"I don't think Mum-Mum ever shot for target," Bruce said. "That would have been too wasteful. She only shot for necessity—rats, muskrats, that kind of thing."
Our basement tour fails to make the impending dissection more palatable. I want to race home, eat a salad, and soak in a hot bath. "It's not that gross; you'll see. You don't attack it like a...," he says, pausing. "Even butchers are delicate in how they do things. It'll be fun," he adds consolingly.
The next morning is the day before Thanksgiving. I pull up to the shop. The air is brisk, and the sky is filled with high wispy clouds. The sycamores that line Main Street are bare, and an American flag hangs from nearly every house. Through the plateglass window, I see Bruce setting up his window display, an eastern wild turkey (mounted) and two human skeletons (fake).
Bruce, in a denim apron and jeans, has a backlog of projects to finish before Christmas, and the workshop is filled with half-mounted birds and beasts. I sit at the worktable, which is strewn with scalpels, knives, poultry shears, scissors, razor blades, a sharpening stone, and a thawed Milltown gray squirrel shrouded in paper towels. Attached to the squirrel with a rubber band is
a bank deposit slip on which is written "Milltown Squirrel 9/10/03 DJS. Drowned. OK. Juvenile. Female."
Bruce wipes the blood and condensation off the squirrel, prepping it for skinning. "I want this to be a nice specimen for you," he says, placing it on newspaper in front of me. The squirrel, when I inspect it, is nothing like the plump squirrels in the AMNH diorama. It is bone thin and has a mangy tail, a bloody nose, and a stained bib. Its cloudy, sunken eyes are (thankfully) shut, and its meager whiskers need mascara.
"Only one tooth?" I ask. Bruce points out its other brown incisor. Then he says, "When he's pickled and washed and fluffed, you'll be surprised."
"If it's really nice, I can enter it into the World Show," I hear myself say. It's a joke, but Bruce says why not.
When David shuffles in from his nap, he explains how he had baited a trap for groundhogs (they were eating his tomatoes) and caught two squirrels instead. "I let one go, but this one I'm fed up with," he says, settling into his rocker.
"What kind of trap?" I ask.
"A Havahart," David says dryly, then chuckles.
I hold up the bank deposit slip. It says the squirrel drowned. "Aaaaah! I was teaching it how to swim," David says. "That's the way I killed it. I put it in the fishpond, and it didn't swim." "Teaching it how to swim" is a taxidermic euphemism for drowning, which results in less darning than bullet holes. At certain times of the year, squirrels are classified as pests and can be legally "liquidated" (Bruce's word; David says "killed") on your own property. That's what David did.
Psychologically, the first cut—scoring the belly with a razor blade—is the worst, and I feel like a medical student making her first incision. Bruce guides me to the middle of the chest bone, but my untrained hand is unsteady, and I'm terrified that I will cut too deeply and rupture an internal organ. The razor blade is dull. We exchange it for a sharp one as a violin concerto on the radio builds to a crescendo.
Still Life Page 23