After I score the chest, David hands me a rosewood scalpel that he made for Bruce on the occasion of the tiger he skinned for Great Adventure amusement park. It's engraved TO DBS FROM DAD, 1974. (Bruce's first name is actually David.) "There you go, Petunia," he says.
With the scalpel, I cut through the scored skin, then work my way to the outer edges of the body, loosening the pelt, which I peel off the animal's delicate rib cage. The ribs are as tiny as a leaf's veins; they protect the internal organs, now fully exposed. "You want to go to the outside of that pink meat," Bruce instructs. My latex gloves are wet and covered with tiny hairs; hardly any of them are gray, because a gray squirrel's hair is mostly bands of black and white. Slippage—when hair comes off in clumps—is a taxidermic nightmare. The few strands on my gloves do not constitute slippage. "Very good on this side. Gee whiz, look at that! You can go down on the right. I don't see any holes," says Bruce.
The squirrel is now lying on its side, both knees skinned and exposed, its sack of organs a tiny water balloon. "I'm really proud of my knees," I say, surprising myself. Then I turn the squirrel over to skin its back, feeling the scalpel run against the ridges of the spine. I skin the body, then the legs down to the delicate ankles. Soon the entire skin easily lifts off the back. I reach an impasse: disarticulating the hind legs by cutting the ball joint out of the hip socket. "Use the scissors, but don't cut the skin. Are you able to feel that joint? It's right there. Now cut down here. Use your finger like a pencil," says Bruce.
Mum-Mum I am not. I puncture the lower intestines (I can't tell one organ from another), and something resembling soupy baked beans spills out. "Oooooh! Something just fell out of the body!" I shriek in horror. I'm beside myself, repulsed and disheartened. I put down the scalpel and look to Bruce for help. He deftly sutures up the gash in seconds. "Just like ER!" he says.
"I can't stand it! I don't want to look at thaaaat!" David mocks. His taunting eggs me on, makes me want to finish the job and not wimp out.
Somehow, I manage to sever the ear skin from the ear canal and then loosen the nose and the lips. "Stay close to the skull. You can trim the meat off later," David coaches. It's impossible to discern skin from cartilage from skull. "Stay close to that bone. Stay right by the skull. Come over toward me a little. Not your body—your knife!" says Bruce.
"That's where your thumbnail would come in handy," says David. "You don't wear gloves when you prepare a steak!"
The single bulb dangling from the ceiling is not sufficient for this intricate work. Before I disconnect the eyelids from the eye orbit in the skull, we measure the milky eyes: ten millimeters. Then Bruce turns an eyelid inside out and demonstrates how one severs such delicate tissue. Now I have to "turn" the other one. I can't! "C'mon! It's your initiation!" David wails.
"Feel it!" coaches Bruce.
The eye is still connected to the skull by a film that must be cut through. If I puncture the eye, the aqueous humor will squirt out. For a visual person, nothing is more revolting than slicing an eye, and the opening sequence of Luis Buñuel's 1929 film Un chien andalou floods my memory like a nightmare. So does high school biology, when I nearly fainted while dissecting a sheep's eye. This requires more stamina than both of those things combined.
"Don't worry about puncturing the eye! The eyelids are what you've got to worry about," says David.
My forearms are covered with blood. Somehow, I manage to cut the membrane between the eyelid and the eye. Nothing squirts out. David pours me a cup of instant coffee with powdered Coffee-mate. The Coffee-mate resembles borax and arsenic, but I no longer have qualms about drinking and eating in the workshop.
"You're doing fine. You'd be out of here if you were having trouble," Bruce says.
"That's why we didn't get you a vomit bag," David says with a laugh. "I figured if we didn't have a vomit bag, you wouldn't vomit."
Finally, I detach the last foreleg from the body. The skinned squirrel rests in a heap on the table. Bruce says I can tidy up and go home right after David and I prepare a "sketch sheet" to use as reference: an outline of the extracted carcass (posed) that we will use to determine the form of the artificial body.
My cell phone rings. It's my mother, preparing Thanksgiving dinner. Can I pick up a large roasting pan and string beans? Of course, right after I sketch my flayed squirrel onto a piece of nonglossy paper.
David hands me a reference file filled with nature photographs of squirrels to inspire a pose. But the pose I have in mind comes directly from my personal observations in New York City: a squirrel racing across a wire, its body elongated, its eyes intently focused on something beyond the viewer. David takes the carcass, elongates it, and traces its outline to show its anatomy, its proportions, and the articulation of what's underneath the skin. The sketch sheet emphasizes its hips and shoulders—pivot points where the anatomy comes together. It will be my sole reference when I return next month to make the artificial body.
As I wash up and look for my purse, Bruce tightens the tail in a vice and yanks out the long bone with pliers in one swift movement—something you can do only if you've been skinning squirrels your entire life. "That's impressive," I say, and it truly is. Bruce is elated and buoyant. David finishes the sketch, we both sign it, and Bruce says, "This is the first ten percent of the taxidermy process of doing a squirrel."
Over the course of the next six months, the window display of Schwendeman's Taxidermy Studio changes from turkeys and skeletons to groundhogs to a big domestic rabbit for Easter. The workshop also contains new batches of snakes, wading birds, and deer heads. Each time I arrive, the worktable is already set with that day's tools, the thawing pelt, the sketch sheet, and the hairless frozen body in plastic wrap, for reference.
Of all the procedures, fleshing is the most tedious, the most repellent, and it smells. Bruce compares the process to removing the meat from a walnut shell without breaking the shell's paper-thin partitions. I spend an entire day nipping and extracting tiny bits of meat with scissors and a small knife, paring down the neck, the ear tubes, the lips, the tiny toes (with a toe probe), even the split tail, until my eyes blur and my hand aches. Then I surrender the pelt to Bruce, who has to redo my crude eyelids and the underside of the face. He also has to sew up the holes I made when I got sloppy and pierced the skin. Finally, the skin is ready to be tanned. For this, Bruce uses an antique glass salimeter (passed down from Schwendeman to Schwendeman, as if it were the family Bible) to measure the sodium content of his new pickle. Then order number 6499—"Squirrel on a Wire"—takes a long, salty bath.
On one visit, we make the artificial form. When I step inside the workshop, Bruce, who has decided that we should work in tandem, is grooming a squirrel of his own. His squirrel is not ordinary; it is rare and exotic: an albino he's been saving for a special occasion. Today he's going to set its pink eyes (glass bulbs the color of calamine lotion). Bruce's own eyes happen to be burned-out from too much squinting at whiskers, eye rings, and tiny toes. He could use reading glasses but prefers a blue metal magnifying visor (circa 1960) typically worn by jewelers or watchmakers. He looks through the visor's square lenses to set the pink eyes. Then he pauses and hands me four wires to sharpen on an electric file until the points can easily impale skin. These wires will be used to make the limbs. For the rest of the day, we work side by side, mentor and apprentice. The master, David, stops by periodically to repair a hornets' nest, to report his bird sightings, and mostly to hassle Bruce—and me.
I wind the wire limbs with excelsior, using a motion that feels like spooling a kite string. I wind and I wind until the limbs look leglike—that is, the thigh is not where the foot should be and the foreleg is not as fat as the hind leg. (I have to redo them more than once.) To make the tail, Bruce shows me how to wind another wire with cotton thread until it matches the extracted tailbone (in front of us for reference). We do the same for the body. I like winding. It puts me in a Zen-like state: it keeps my eyes from staring with macabre curiosity at the fleshi
ng beam (used to skin big animals), the steaming cauldron of deer-skull plates, and all the other oddities that evoke a medieval apothecary. Soon I imagine myself as an apprentice to the spinning docent at Colonial Williamsburg. It's not so far-fetched. The soft-bodied technique is, in fact, 250 years old, although this shop is a holdout, not a tourist attraction.
On another visit, David walks into the workshop at nine A.M. with three foam squirrel heads he cast that morning. They are still warm from curing. We choose the best one, carve eye orbits into it, and coat the sockets with smooth clay. Bruce goes over to his junk drawer and digs around for the perfect glass eyes. When he hands me antique black bulbs from Germany, I feel great. He'd never waste them on a rogue. I'm finally working with confidence, when David tells me to insert the artificial body into the treated skin. It does not fit. It is too fat; it has a potbelly. "Stretch it!" David yells. Like I'm zipping up super-tight pants or cramming a child's foot into a stiff ice skate, I squish and compress the body, then stretch the skin with all my might, trying to make it fit. David helps me. We stretch. We pull. Somehow we get the body inside the skin.
David sings, "Oh, the ham bone's connected to the thighbone..."
Meanwhile, Bruce, done with the albino, is now grooming a different squirrel, this one for Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History. I glance at the Yale squirrel (plump, confident, can tackle any artificial tree), then at my scrawny New Jersey rodent. Its hams look undernourished; its femur lacks authority; its tarsus is skeletal; the back of its skull is concave. Bruce hands me an old tobacco tin filled with tow and tells me to plump wherever the squirrel needs muscle and fat. "These are my favorite tweezers. Don't bend them!" he booms. With chopsticks dexterity, I take small puffs of tow and pad the "bones" under the skin. The squirrel needs considerable plumping, it turns out. I plump and I plump. Lost in thought, still plumping, I'm jolted alert by David's voice: "Don't lump it up!" Watching me from his rocker, which is held together with duct tape, he shakes his head and raises his eyebrows. "Okay, Petunia. Do you have a needle and thread?"
I spend several hours sewing it up. (Stitching paw pads is a very strange sensation. Imagine stabbing a needle through a thin eraser.) Then I move on to the finishing work, the part where a taxidermist can play God or Mother Nature by deciding whether his or her replica will look pensive, content, or vicious. Regretfully, I forgot to study the preskinned squirrel's face, so I have no choice but to approximate. I trim off the excess mouth skin, then tuck the loose flaps into the crooked mouth slot (tight as military sheets, I'm afraid). A slight frown, perhaps, but the wonder of taxidermy is the zillions of magic tricks it offers, enabling you to alter nature. A sprightly tail and eager, wide eyes should compensate, I hope, for the grimace. I slide the eyelids up and down on the glass eyes, making the squirrel look drunk, then guilty, then panic-stricken. I surgically enhance the eyebrows with papier-mâché paste to give them definition and make the face cuter. The legs are a bit lopsided, and the shoulder padding has slipped down inside the arm as if it were a furry sleeve, but my fingers are too cramped to open the thing back up and resew it. So I shine up the eyes with cotton dipped in gasoline, then stick long pins into the face to immobilize the skin while it dries.
On my last visit to Schwendeman's Taxidermy Studio, I coat the paw pads, lips, and nose with a secret Schwendeman's beeswax concoction, then sculpt and paint them. Finally, I dot the corners of the eyes with shellac until they glisten with the dew of heaven, and the squirrel springs to life. "It looks great," David says. I smile with pride.
Before I go home, Bruce wires the squirrel to a dowel so that I can transport it back to Brooklyn. Once it's affixed to the rod, I can picture how amazing it will look inside the display case I've designed for it. The squirrel will be racing across a black wire above the doorway of a seedy basement apartment that is lit by a bare yellow bulb. I've named the case Gray Squirrel, Yellow Dawn.
10. GRAY SQUIRREL, YELLOW DAWN
IN 2005, EMILY MAYER was competing in the World Taxidermy Championships for the first time. When she arrived at the Crowne Plaza in Springfield, Illinois, a bellhop looked at her and said, "So you're a rock star?"
"No! A rat star!" she snapped, and walked inside.
I followed her through the lobby (buffalo heads on baggage carts; deer heads on escalators) to room 407. We were sharing a room for the next five days, and we were both uneasy about the competition. She set her stainless steel rat case on one of the beds, grabbed a beer from the minibar, and rigged up a work area near the window. Then she unhinged the case and extracted four extraordinarily succulent Rattus norvegicus specimens with translucent feet. "Bloody hell!" she shouted. A fluorescent light bulb for one of her displays had broken in transit. "Oh, bugger!"
A minute later, Paul Rhymer showed up with my squirrel. He had driven it from his house in Maryland so I wouldn't have to take it through airport security. Rhymer's Smithsonian ID serves as something akin to diplomatic immunity in the eyes of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents. When Mayer had landed at JFK International Airport two days before, customs officers had seized her rat case, and she'd had to spend an entire day filling out paperwork to get it back. Mayer's "USFWS Form 3–177: Declaration for Importation or Exportation of Fish and Wildlife" listed eleven items:
FOUR Rattus norvegicus (brown rat)
ONE Oryctolagus cuniculus (European rabbit fetus)
THREE Mustela nivalis (weasel)
ONE Micromys minutus (harvest mouse)
ONE Canis familiaris (domestic dog)
ONE Melopsittacus undulatus (Budgerigar parakeet)
I introduced Rhymer to Mayer. He glanced at her BITCH.COM T-shirt and said, "I want to make a T-shirt that says IT'S JUST TAXIDERMY!"
She nodded. "I want to make one that says I DO IT WITH DEAD ANIMALS."
He sat on one of the beds watching as I removed the squirrel from its cardboard travel box. The squirrel looked great, I thought; its fragile ears and tail had arrived intact, if a tad mangy. It was impressive for a first mount. Rhymer was silent.
The last time I'd seen him was at the Behring hall ribbon cutting, when I was admiring the orangutan he had painstakingly de-pickled. Now he was examining my juvenile Sciurus carolinensis. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. His eyes roved from whisker pad to paw pad and back again. He was clearly puzzled by something, but he uttered not a word. Then, finally, he sprang up off of the bed and yelled, which is uncharacteristic of him.
"Wax!" he hollered.
Wax? He bent down, inspecting the squirrel more closely. His eyes lingered on its waxy brown lips. (They were a bit bumpy, I guessed. I'd never noticed that before.) He scrutinized its tiny paws with their sharp brown claws. He shook his head dourly. Then he grinned from ear to ear. He said nothing except, once again, "Wax."
Then: "That's old, old, old, old! The only taxidermist at the Smithsonian who used wax we called a waxidermist." Suddenly I understood what was going on. The Schwendemans had let me enter the most elite taxidermy event in the universe with a history lesson! The squirrel was perfect—for 1938. But it was not 1938. Suddenly, I remembered the day Bruce had sent me home with an old pamphlet published by Modern Taxidermist called "The Squirrel Mounting Book" by Leon Pray. Its brittle pages flaked when I turned them—which I didn't do much. Now I wished I had. Now I understood, and it was not funny. I was about to compete with a Model T.
Yes, the old methods may exist these days only at places such as Schwendeman's Taxidermy Studio (where Mum-Mum's beeswax is in fresh supply and antique salimeters measure the salt content in Pup-Pup's secret recipe for pickle), but here, at the WTC, where judges inspect anatomy with an obsessiveness that verges on oblivion (as one photographer aptly put it), beeswax paws and lips would be embarrassingly arcane.
Rhymer hadn't finished his lobster in time for the competition, so he coached me on how to modernize the antique squirrel in twelve hours. "You can sculpt out these lips, and since they're wax, you can heat them up on this light bulb," he said, p
ointing to the lamp on the nightstand that separated my bed from Mayer's. "You can take a toothbrush and fluff it up. Buy a sculpting tool at the trade show—a deer-lip tucking tool will cost around five to fifteen dollars. Then dig out the lips. Go to Jo-Ann Fabrics and buy dark umber craft paint. Scrape and rebuild the paw pads with epoxy."
No other competitor had a third-generation Smithsonian taxidermist in his or her hotel room acting as coach. I was exceptionally lucky, if deflated.
I defended my squirrel, though. Had I been drowned by an old, unsentimental taxidermist, I can't say I'd look this good. Its imperfections gave it character: its rust-stained bib and brown incisors showed that it had cracked its own nuts (a pampered zoo captive it was not); its thin whiskers evoked Clark Gable's elegant mustache; even the wax anatomy was noble in this sea of store-bought plastic. Okay, so you couldn't look up its nostrils to see its brain (its nostrils were stuffed with papier-mâché paste—the mark of a beginner), yet I'd made everything—except for the glass eyes and, of course, the "derm"—by hand. My squirrel had personality; it was humble and wiry, a fighter who'd survived in the shadow of the NewJersey Turnpike. It had, if just barely, the vital spark of life.
No matter. Rhymer would not buy my excuses. Taxidermy, like basic mathematics, is empirical; you can't compete with a fantasy creature. Again and again, the taxidermists I'd met had told me: taxidermists are restricted to duplicate what nature has already created. (If only Rhymer had accompanied Charles Darwin on the voyage of the HMS Beagle, I thought, the world would not still be arguing about natural selection.)
Rhymer shook his head, his mind clicking. He grabbed a notebook by the phone and sketched squirrel feet so that I'd have reference when I rebuilt the paw pads. His eyes followed the long seam that ran ventrally from the squirrel's sternum to its anus, as if the crude stitches were primitive surgery. "You can minimize the seams by fifty percent by pulling out the hairs from under the thread with a sewing needle. Then take a toothbrush or a wire brush and back-brush it to make the fur look softer," he said, quickly adding, "Even city squirrels are fluffy."
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