Meanwhile, a paint company executive named Bob Williamson had decided that competitive taxidermy was more fun than selling taxidermy paint, so he set out to host his own competition, which he boldly called the World Taxidermy Championships. Soon he had copyrighted the name and the competition categories. (Try passing yourself off as a World Taxidermy Champion, and you just might get sued!) The first WTC took place in 1983, drawing nearly three hundred taxidermists, including a few competitors from Canada and Europe.
In 1994, however, Williamson sold the WTC to a former schoolteacher named Larry Blomquist, who—together with his wife, Kathy (whom he poached from Taxidermy Today magazine)—has run it (and Breakthrough magazine) ever since.
Many participants asked me why I was at the WTC. They found it incomprehensible that someone who was not a taxidermist, a hunter, or a zoologist would find taxidermy so intriguing. The subtle shame lived on, even here among the elite. Usually this was manifested by self-deprecating humor—humming "Dueling Banjos" from Deliverance, for instance, or claiming that one's genetic makeup contained the "Taxidermy gene" ("T gene" for short)—a propensity to procrastinate. Some taxidermists went so far as to compare themselves to serial killers—an industry cliché based on the belief that as kids, serial killers abused their pets. (Jeffrey Dahmer did consider taxidermy as a profession, and he did skin dogs.) Several of the taxidermists who had attended college or graduate school wanted it known. Others spoke of children and grandchildren who were now enrolled. A woman whose husband was a bird judge told a story that epitomized the unease felt by the entire field. When her daughter was in third grade, her teacher asked what her father did for a living. The eight-year-old mumbled, "He's a taxidermist."
"A tax attorney?" asked the teacher.
"Oh, yes!" said the daughter with relief.
***
"The fine arts never respected taxidermy and never will," Kish told me. "If you take five of the best sculptors who ever lived and ask them to sculpt something, you'll get five different results. If you ask the five best taxidermists in the world to mount a white-tailed deer, aside from some stylistic differences, they'll all pretty much look like white-tailed deer. We're trying to duplicate something that nature already created. It's kind of like medical illustration."
Jack Fishwick, a tall, thin, bespectacled taxidermist from England who works for natural history museums throughout Europe and whose specialty is birds ("small birds"), was far more blunt: "Even though I do it, I think it is totally weird. Bizarre! It's a pointless exercise, because it will never be perfect. No matter how good you are, you'll only get a semblance of life. It'll never be alive again. A sculptor can make things soft and flowing to give the impression of speed or agility, but a taxidermist is restricted to re-creat[ing] nature exactly."
By day two, the Crowne Plaza was a fourteen-story Wunderkammer. The grand ballroom contained 701 competition mounts. The seminar rooms hosted live taxidermy demonstrations—the zoological equivalent of Thomas Eakins's painting The Gross Clinic. And many of its 288 hotel rooms were inhabited by beasts and birds that looked freshly plucked from the forest or the tundra or the veldt. This presented something of a challenge to the hotel staff, who suffered random encounters with snarling effigies, a series of unintentional practical jokes.
One day after lunch, I stopped by my room to make a call. The door was open and the housekeeper was making my bed, so I stood outside with the floor supervisor, a twenty-five-year-old from Lima, Peru. When I asked him what he made of all this, his eyes brightened and he said, "The housekeepers called me a few time: 'Someone has to come and open the door for me because there's a tiger!' They get scared of small snakes." He pointed down the hall. "The housekeeper over there—we told her to be careful of room number 615. There's a big anaconda in there from Peru."
Ken Walker stood in a packed conference room preparing to give his talk, "Competition Techniques and Strategies." As people searched for seats, he arranged a bear skull and two sets of plastic jaws (cougar and bobcat) on a long table. The "jaw sets" resembled wind-up toys—pink-gummed dentures that chatter across your desk. He was using them to animate his talk—not that he needs props to enliven his speaking. Like Hornaday, Walker can hold a crowd captive. He's a world-class talent and a Smithsonian taxidermist; everyone here wanted to know how to sculpt forms the Ken Walker way, which is to say with grace, speed, and accuracy.
"Why even compete? It's a waste of money," he began in his Canadian accent. "Really, isn't it the person who has the most green ribbons who wins? I realized early on in my career that I wouldn't be rich. So why not be famous? I've never taken the safe road. You learn nothing from winning. But those third-place ribbons taught me a lot." As he talked, his hands were shaping a tiny marten out of warm gray clay. He's been working with clay since he was a kid fascinated with Claymation movies. "Okey-dokey. This is my therapy since they let me out. I couldn't get that needlepoint down." He's only halfjoking, because later in his talk he would compare taxidermy to flower arranging. It's the same thing—an obsessive fabrication
