In the morning, I stood on the beach in the magenta hue of dawn. A ruby brilliance shone over the horizon and reflected onto the water. The uppermost reaches of the sky were crimson and cobalt, the shoreline dark. A lone boat was out at sea; the silhouette of a single fisherman added a feeling of tranquility to the scene. Suddenly, the warmth of two muscular arms wrapped around me. I spun around.There was Jonathan, a man I had longed for since I first laid eyes on him years earlier.
“What are you doing here? How did you find me?”
He pressed his finger to my lips to silence me. He carried me into the water where we met the colors of the sunrise. Our wet bodies trembled as one in the sea. He kissed me gently, working his way down the nape of my neck. As he reached the silky fabric of my blouse, I awoke to the most God-awful, slobbering, mangy dog in my hammock, smelling like he had rolled in something that crawled out from the bottom of the sea and died. You could see his green breath with every forceful pant.
After a night of fitful sleep, filled with more wild erotic dreams, I just had to find out what was in the yellow lady. As I explored the town that day, I asked shopkeepers, bartenders, everyone. All they would say was “Damiana,” and then they would smile, nod, and wink. Finally a waiter added to the mystery. “Ahhhh, the Love Liqueur” was all he said.
Determined to find out the truth, I found the tag that came tied around the neck of the bottle. I brought out my “Spanish-English” dictionary, my “English-Spanish” dictionary, my Spanish for Travelers in Mexico book, my Everything You Need to Know While Travelling in Baja book, and the electronic translator I had purchased for times such as these. I looked up every word on that tag.
Two of the Spanish words were not in any of the books. When I entered them into the little electronic brain however, the words “powerful aphrodisiac” popped up. It all came rushing back to me, Don Chong, Pablo, Pedro, and all those dreams.
Oh, those dreams.
Katie McLane was born in Cambridge, England, and now lives in the Pacific Northwest on her thirty-two-foot sailboat, moondance. When she is not sailing about the San Juan Islands, she is working on her first book, 2000 Tides.
After lunch, I headed back to the air-conditioned luxury of the tour bus to await the trip back to Cancún.The driver and I were the only people on the bus. I asked him, “¿Habla inglés?” He didn’t speak English, so we tried to converse in Spanish. Let me rephrase that. I tried. He, on the other hand, had a perfectly good grasp of his native language. We exchanged pleasant hellos. Then he, like every male I’d come across in Mexico thus far, complemented me on my amarillo hair. I was a yellow-blonde on that first trip to Mexico, and on my first day there I had felt like the most beautiful woman in the world because the men were much more attentive to me than those in my home country of Canada. I thanked the bus driver, who then said something that I did not understand. He then did something quite strange; he pulled down the zipper on his pants! I’m not quite sure if he was trying to show me that the hair on his carpet matched that of his attic, but all I could think of saying was, ”¡No entiendo!” That ended that conversation, and the zipper went back up. I never felt I was in any danger, but to this day, I still wonder which of my Spanglish he mistook for, “Please undo your pants for me, Señor Bus Driver”
—Louise Schutte, “Spanglish and Me”
SUSAN ORLEAN
Lifelike
Honey, what’s that in the freezer?
AS SOON AS THE 2003 WORLD TAXIDERMY CHAMPIONships opened, the heads came rolling in the door.There were foxes and moose and freeze-dried wild turkeys; mallards and buffalo and chipmunks and wolves; weasels and buffleheads and bobcats and jackdaws; big fish and little fish and razorbacked boar.The deer came in herds, in carloads, and on pallets: dozens and dozens of whitetail and roe; half deer and whole deer and deer with deformities, sneezing and glowering and nuzzling and yawning; does chewing apples and bucks nibbling leaves.There were millions of eyes, boxes and bowls of them, some as small as a lentil and some as big as a poached egg. There were animal mannequins, blank faced and brooding, earless and eyeless and utterly bald: ghostly gray duikers and spectral pine martens and black-bellied tree ducks from some other world. An entire exhibit hall was filled with equipment, all the gear required to bring something dead back to life: replacement noses for grizzlies, false teeth for beavers, fish-fin cream, casting clay, upholstery nails.
The championships were held in April at the Springfield, Illinois, Crowne Plaza hotel, the sort of nicely appointed place that seems more suited to regional sales conferences and rehearsal dinners than to having wolves in the corridors and people crossing the lobby shouting, “Heads up! Buffalo coming through!” A thousand taxidermists converged on Springfield to have their best pieces judged and to attend such seminars as “Mounting Flying Waterfowl,” “Whitetail Deer—From a Master!,” and “Using a Fleshing Machine.” In the Crowne Plaza lobby, across from the concierge desk, a grooming area had been set up. The taxidermists were bent over their animals, holding flashlights to check problem areas like tear ducts and nostrils and wielding toothbrushes to tidy flyaway fur. People milled around, greeting fellow taxidermists they hadn’t seen since the world championships, held in Springfield two years ago, and talking shop.
“Acetone rubbed on a squirrel tail will fluff it right back up.”
“My feeling is that it’s quite tough to do a good tongue.”
“The toes on a real competitive piece are very important. I think Bondo works nicely, and so does Super Glue.”
“I knew a fellow with cattle, and I told him, ‘If you ever have one stillborn, I’d really like to have it.’ I thought it would make a really nice mount.”
That there is a taxidermy championship at all is something of an astonishment, not only to the people in the world who have no use for a Dan-D-Noser and Soft Touch Duck Degreaser, but also to taxidermists themselves. For a long time, taxidermists kept their own counsel. Taxidermy, the three-dimensional representation of animals for permanent display, has been around since the eighteenth century, but it was first brought into popular regard by the Victorians, who thrilled to all tokens of exotic travel and especially to any domesticated representations of wilderness—the glassed-in miniature rain forest on the tea table, the mounted antelope by the front door.The original taxidermists were upholsterers who tanned the hides of hunting trophies and then plumped them up with rags and cotton, so that they reassumed their original shape and size; those early poses were still and simple, the expressions fairly expressionless. The practice grew popular in this country, too: by 1882, there was a Society of American Taxidermists, which held annual meetings and published scholarly reports, especially on the matter of preparing animals for museum display. As long as taxidermy served to preserve wild animals and make them available for study, it was viewed as an honorable trade, but most people were still discomfited by it. How could you not be? It was the business of dealing with dead things, coupled with the questionable enterprise of making dead things look like live things. In spite of its scientific value, it was usually regarded as almost a black art, a wholly owned subsidiary of witchcraft and voodoo. By the early part of the twentieth century, taxidermists such as Carl E. Akeley, William T. Hornaday, and Leon Pray had refined techniques and begun emphasizing artistry. But the more the techniques of taxidermy improved, the more it discomfited: Instead of the lumpy moose head that was so artless that it looked fake, there were mounts of pouncing bobcats so immaculately and exactly preserved, they made you flinch.
For the next several decades, taxidermy existed in the margins—a few practitioners here and there, often self-taught and usually known only by word of mouth. Then, in the late 1960s, a sort of transformation began: the business started to seem cleaner and less creepy—or maybe, in that messy, morbid time, popular culture started to again appreciate the messy, morbid business of mounting animals for display. An ironic reinterpretation of cluttered, bourgeois Victoriana and its strained juxtapositions of the natur
al and the man-made was in full revival—what hippie outpost didn’t have a stuffed owl or a moose head draped with a silk shawl?—so, once again, taxidermy found a place in the public eye. Supply houses concocted new solvents and better tanning compounds, came out with lightweight mannequins, produced modern formulations of resins and clays. Taxidermy schools opened; previously, any aspiring taxidermist could hope to learn the trade only by apprenticing or by taking one of a few correspondence courses available. In 1971, the National Taxidermy Association was formed (the old society had moldered long before). In 1974, a trade magazine called Taxidermy Review began sponsoring national competitions. For the first time, most taxidermists had a chance to meet one another and share advice on how to glue tongues into jaw sets or accurately measure the carcass of a squirrel.
The competitions were also the first time that taxidermists could compare their skills and see who in the business could sculpt the best moose septum or could most perfectly capture the look on a prowling coyote’s face.Taxidermic skill is a function of how deft you are at skinning an animal and then stretching its hide over a mannequin and sewing it into place. Top-of-the-line taxidermists sculpt their own mannequins; otherwise they will buy a ready-made polyurethane foam form and tailor the skin to fit. Body parts that can’t be preserved (ears, eyes, noses, lips, tongues) can be either store-bought or hand-made. How good the mount looks—that is, how alive it looks—is a function of how assiduously the taxidermist has studied reference material (photographs, drawings, and actual live animals) so that he or she knows the particular creature literally and figuratively inside out.
To be good at taxidermy, you have to be good at sewing, sculpting, painting, and hairdressing, and mostly you have to be a little bit of a zoology nerd. You have to love animals— love looking at them, taking photographs of them, hunting them, measuring them, casting them in plaster of Paris when they’re dead so that you have a reference when you’re, say, attaching ears or lips and want to get the angle and shape exactly right. Some taxidermists raise the animals they most often mount, so they can just step out in the backyard when they’re trying to remember exactly how a deer looks when it’s licking its nose, especially because modern taxidermy emphasizes mounts with interesting expressions, rather than the stunned-looking creations of the past.Taxidermists seem to make little distinction between loving animals that are alive and loving ones that are not.”I love deer,” one of my champions in the Whitetail division said to me. “They’re my babies.”
Not long after our arrival in England, a fellow American student developed a hankering for fried chicken while riding the London Underground.
Silently giving thanks for the abundance of fast-food establishments dotting London, she resolved to ask the first person she saw where she might find a Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Stepping off the train, she saw a woman handing out tracts. As the woman pressed one into her hand, my friend asked eagerly, “Excuse me, where is the nearest Kentucky Fried Chicken?”
The woman’s pleasant expression quickly changed to one of shock and disgust.
My friend looked down at the tract in her hand. It began, “Each day, thousands of chickens are needlessly slaughtered to satisfy the gluttony of man…”
—Carol Penn-Romine, “Tastes of Home”
Taxidermy is now estimated to be a $570 million annual business, made up of small operators around the country who mount animals for museums, for decorators, and mostly for the 13 million or so Americans who are recreational hunters and on occasion want to preserve and display something they killed and who are willing to shell out anywhere from two hundred dollars to mount a pheasant to several thousand for a kudu or a grizzly bear.There are state and regional taxidermy competitions throughout the year; two trade magazines; a score of taxidermy schools; and 3,000 visits to Taxidermy.net every day, where taxidermists can trade information and goods with as little self-consciousness as you would find on a knitting website:
“I am in need of several pair of frozen goat feet?”
“Hi! I have up to three hundred sets of goat feet and up to one thousand sets of sheep feet per month. Drop me an email at frozencritters.com…or give me a call and we can discuss your needs.”
“I have a very nice small raccoon that is frozen whole. I forgot he was in the freezer. Without taking exact measurements I would guess he is about twelve inches or so—very cute little one. Will make a very nice mount.”
“Can I rinse a boar hide good and freeze it?”
“Bob, if it’s salted, don’t worry about it!”
“Can someone please tell me the proper way to preserve turkey legs and spurs? Thanks!”
“Brian, I inject the feet with Preservz-It…Enjoy!”
The word in the grooming area was that a piece to beat was Chris Krueger’s happy-looking otters swimming in a perpetual circle around a leopard frog. A posting on Taxidermy.net earlier in the week declared, “EVERYTHING about this mount KICKS BUTT!!” Kicking butt, in this area of taxidermy, requires having a mount that is not just lifelike but also artistic. It used to be enough to do what taxidermists call “fish on a stick” displays; now a serious competitor worries about things like flow and negative space and originality. One of this year’s contenders, for instance, Ken Walker’s giant panda, had artistry and accuracy going for it, along with the element of surprise. The thing looked a hundred percent pure panda, but you can’t go out and shoot a panda, and you aren’t likely to get hold of a panda that has met a natural end, so everyone was dying to know how he had done it. The day the show opened, Walker was in the grooming area, gluing bamboo into place behind the animal’s paws, and a crowd had gathered around him. Walker works as a staff taxidermist for the Smithsonian. He is a breezy, shaggy-haired guy whose hands are always busy. One day, I saw him holding a piece of clay while waiting for a seminar to begin, and within thirty seconds, or so, without actually paying much attention to it, he had molded the clay into a little minklike creature.
“The panda was actually pretty easy,” he was saying. “I just took two black bears and bleached one of them—I think I used Clairol Basic. Then I sewed the two skins together into a panda pattern.” He took out a toothbrush and fluffed the fur on the panda’s face. “At the world championship two years ago, a guy came in with an extinct Labrador duck. I was in awe. I thought, What could beat that—an extinct duck? And I came up with this idea.” He said he thought that the panda would get points for creativity alone. “You can score a ninety-eight with a squirrel, but it’s still a squirrel,” he said. “So that means I’m going with a panda.”
“What did you do for toenails, Ken?” Someone asked.
“I left the black bear’s toenails in,” he said. “They looked pretty good.”
Another passerby stopped to admire the panda. He was carrying a grooming kit, which appeared to contain Elmer’s glue, brown and black paint, a small tool set, and a bottle of Suave mousse. “I killed a blond bear once,” he said to Ken. “A two-hundred-pound sow. Whew, she made a beautiful mount.”
“I’ll bet,” Ken said. He stepped back to admire the panda. “I like doing re-creations of these endangered animals and extinct animals, since that’s the only way anyone’s going to have one. Two years ago, I did a saber-toothed cat. I got an old lioness from a zoo and bleached her.”
The panda was entered in the Re-Creation (Mammal) division, one of the dozens of divisions and subdivisions and sub-subcategories, ranging from the superspecific (Whitetail Deer Long Hair, Open Mouth division) to the sweepingly colossal (Best in World), that would share in twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of prizes. (There is even a sub-sub-subspecialty known as “fish carving,” which uses no natural fish parts at all; it is resin and wood sculpted into a fish form and then painted.) Nearly all the competitors are professionals, and they publicize their awards wherever possible. For instance, instead of ordering just any Boar Eye-Setting Reference Head out of taxidermy catalog, you can order the Noonkester’s #NRBERH head sculpted
by Bones Johnson, which was, as the catalog notes, the 2000 National Taxidermy Association Champion Gamehead.
The taxidermists take the competition very seriously. During the time I was in Springfield, I heard conversations analyzing such arcane subjects as exactly how much a javelina’s snout wrinkles when it snarls and which molars deer use to chew acorns as opposed to which ones they use to chew leaves. This is important because the ultimate goal of a taxidermist is to make the animal look exactly as if it had never died, as if it were still in the middle of doing ordinary animal things like plucking berries off a bush or taking a nap. When I walked around with the judges one morning, I heard discussions that were practically Talmudic, about whether the eyelids on a particular bison mount were overdetailed, and whether the nostrils on a springbok were too wide, and whether the placement of whiskers on an otter appeared too deliberate. “You do get compulsive,” a taxidermist in the exhibit hall explained to me one afternoon. At the time, he was running a feather duster over his entry—a bobcat hanging off an icicle-covered rock—in the last moments before the judging would begin. “When you’re working on a piece, you forget to eat, you forget to drink, you even forget to sleep. You get up in the middle of the night and go into the shop so you can keep working. You get completely caught up in it. You want it to be perfect. You’re trying to make something come back to life.”
I said that his bobcat was beautiful and that even the icicles on the piece looked completely real. “I made them myself,” he said. “I used clear acrylic toilet plunger handles. The good Lord sent the idea to me while I was in a hardware store. I just took the handles and put them in the oven at four hundred degrees.” He tapped the icicles and then added, “My wife was pretty worried, but I did it on a nonstick cookie sheet.”
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