My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere Read Free Page A

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 the champions in the Whitetail division said to me. “They’re my babies.”
    Taxidermy is now estimated to be a five-hundred-and-seventy-million-dollar annual business, made up of small operators around the country who mount animals for museums, for decorators, and mostly for the thirteen 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 and the world championships, which are held every other year; two trade magazines; a score of taxidermy schools; and three thousand 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 300 sets of goat feet and up to 1000 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 the 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 era 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 back 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