"Okay, I'm going to have to shoot this one," Hornof says, pressing the shutter of the x-ray camera, which resembles a yellow scuba flashlight and is typically used to diagnose injured racehorses.
"Okay, we're ready to shoot! Ready to shoot!" shouts Stephen Quinn, AMNH senior project manager (aka "Mr. Diorama"). Everyone races out of the radiation zone, then returns to analyze the elephant's scaffolding on a computer monitor.
The two-story hall is dark green serpentinite (a volcanic stone from Vermont) and has twenty-eight dioramas that form an oval around the elephants. Each bay contains an intimate scene of Africa at dusk or at twilight or in the bright midday sun. The hall's subtle light and dramatic shadows have been compared to watching Africa through the windows of a magical train that does not disturb the animals. I'm upstairs near the colobus monkeys, resting my elbows on the marble balcony as if it were a rocky escarpment. Without the usual crowds, the Cape buffalo and mountain nyalas look ready to gallop out of their glass cages and into Central Park. It's a compliment, and something of a taxidermic cliché, to say that a mount is so lifelike you could swear it moved, but the animals here look suspended in motion. Every muscle, whisker, and wrinkle work together to convey, say, the direction of the wind or the scorching heat of the desert.
The next time Hornof yells "Shoot!" a vision of Akeley's famous elephant hunt with Theodore Roosevelt comes to mind. In 1909, the Smithsonian sent Roosevelt (and 260 porters) to Africa to collect specimens, and the AMNH sent Akeley on a similar expedition. The two safaris merged in Kenya, as planned, for a drink and an elephant hunt. Akeley spotted the perfect cow for his museum group, Roosevelt bagged it, and Roosevelt's son Kermit shot its calf. At least that's what Akeley used to say. One biographer suggests that Akeley secretly substituted a larger cow for the president's. Although he craved the publicity of a Roosevelt mount (Roosevelt was his hero), he craved perfection even more. Such was his vision of nature.
It took Akeley and three assistants six years to mount three of these elephants. He and forty native porters skinned and skeletonized them using jackknives in the steamy veldt. Each elephant was painstakingly reduced to four rolled-up skins, preserved with brine and local beeswax. Each skeleton was scraped clean and numbered for anatomical reference. Before Akeley, no one had achieved such startling realism. The elephants appear to trumpet through the hall, displaying the attributes Akeley most admired in them: sagacity, versatility, and comradeship. Paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews, the intrepid explorer, described them like this: "If you want to see a live elephant, you can go to a circus or a zoo. But if you want to see the way an elephant lives, you go to a good museum of natural history. And you owe much of what you see there to the genius of Carl Akeley."
It takes a certain driving passion to want to reproduce a twelve-thousand-pound elephant in all its savage splendor. To duplicate the flora and fauna of an entire continent requires the stamina of a madman. Akeley had the energy of three men and the will of twenty. His quest for realism was insatiable. Every twig, every grain of sand, every star in the sky had to match what he himself had witnessed on one of his expeditions.
I wanted to know more about Akeley. I was especially curious about African Hall, his magnum opus, because I was going to the Smithsonian to watch Ken Walker and the other taxidermists work on its new mammal hall, and I wanted to see what museum taxidermy was like at its peak. In the AMNH archives, I saw Akeley's most intimate handwritten notes, in which he wonders whether a taxidermist can ever be a true artist—especially in the eyes of J. P. Morgan and other rich patrons of the museum. I came across an inventory of every tool and artifact in his studio, which was located in one of the old mammal halls and was called "the elephant studio" by everyone, including, I imagine, the security guards who'd see Akeley working late into the night and hand him a flashlight so that he could get around the place in the dark. I read letters from his divorce lawyer, in which "grounds for desertion" and "tanned topi skins" are discussed with equal importance. Stacks of telegrams fill the archives. They are marked Kabale, Nairobi, Arusha—alluring places where he embarked on his daring wildlife expeditions to collect the skins for these dioramas. One cable reports his tragic death in the Congo in 1926.
If taxidermy were a profitable profession, Akeley's life would be a rags-to-riches story. Clarence Ethan Akeley (later called Carl) was born in 1864 and grew up on a farm in Clarendon, New York, in near poverty. A quiet loner who hated school, he was happiest wading in the fields and swamps around his home, gazing at his friends the birds and other creatures. Not long after Akeley visited the stuffed menagerie of an Englishman who dabbled in taxidermy, he preserved a neighbor's canary that had frozen to death. "Please don't cry," the twelve-year-old said, consoling the grieving owner. "I think I can fix the canary for you. It won't sing, but I think I can make it look as if it could." After that, he borrowed a taxidermy book and spent hours in his room, dissecting and preserving dead animals. Taxidermy was then a popular hobby. Theodore Roosevelt's father nurtured his young son's love of birds and the outdoors with taxidermy lessons. Not so for Akeley. His parents, stern farmers, found taxidermy macabre, impractical,
