Blind creatures who never blink will stare back until they turn to dust. Their muscles and organs, sinews and offal are replaced with hard foam. False teeth and fangs still threaten to nick, but their skin has been turned to leather. Their true scales, feathers and fur remain.
A caricature of the old-world gold Roman military standard, a raptor with wings and rending talons outstretched, now faced off by insatiable weasels. It rears up from fake logs and painted plastic leaves.
It’s a horror showroom for children, left alone in a lightning storm when the power goes out. Especially in the dark, the barest fact of the contest for survival is communicated. This reminder to adults that humans are imposters and upstarts among apex predators, this is why we kill them and stuff them. To remember.
The vegetarians in nature are invariably prey. Hooves are for rooting. Claws for rending. But some hooved animals have made the jump to omnivorism. Some have grown tusks. Vulnerable and soft still, we were prey before but we made tools. Bereft of provisions, we are prey still.
“That’s death on wheels,” says taxidermist Jeffery Sweet, talking about a fisher cat, which is a kind of weasel, family Mustelidae, along with wolverines, polecats, pine martens and stoats. “Even if they’ve just eaten, if something’s moving they’ve got to kill it.”
The subject of fisher cats came up because Sweet was asked to weigh in on a hideous happening in a school teacher’s garage last year, in Ponckhockie. One morning, a perfectly humane school teacher of young children awoke and went outside to attend to his eight pet ducks.
In the garage, duck blood was everywhere. Heads ripped off. Wings broken. Chests torn open. The way in for the killer was a sort of doggie door from the outside duck run, guarded with a small fence, where the pet ducks could stand around defenseless and innocent, sort of dumb, quacking in alarm at the approach of strangers. The slaughter was senseless and total, the carcasses were left uneaten. The school teacher had no experience with duck killers.
“A few things will do that,” said Sweet. “A red fox will do that.”
Sweet explains that almost every fox is 24-inches long from his nose to the base of his tail. And 14-inches around. “Foxes run that size,” he says. But he didn’t rule out a fisher cat.
“Yep. Just the predator in some of this stuff,” says Sweet. “Death on wheels.”
Sweet has been in business preserving dead animals now going on 45 years. He’s got a taxidermy studio and showroom in Saugerties, not more than ten miles from where he was raised.
“All the guys that are left now basically,” says Sweet, talking of taxidermists, “there are a couple of new people, but everybody’s my age. I’m 65. Probably goes along with the hunting and trapping lifestyle.”
Coyote on the bar in Home Sweet Home, Lower East Side
When he was still in school, Sweet remembers, everyone still hunted, trapped and fished. Sweet is quick to take credit for killing and eating everything in this room. A married man, Sweet and his wife resemble feral house cats in that they travel the world killing animals wherever they find them, for the sport of it, for the meat it provides and of course for their hides. The walls of Sweet’s showroom foyer are cluttered with hanging framed photographs of Sweet or his wife, proud and smiling presenting the lifeless carcasses of their victims for the camera.
“I just like wildlife,” says Sweet. “Everything I do in life has to do with animals. I’ll go out of my way to help something injured but I’m part of the lifecycle. I kill things. I harvest things.”
When he’s not helping an injured animal or killing one, Sweet, tireless in his trade, is preserving one.
“I start with a polyurethane form. This is for a coyote,” he says, pronouncing the word in two syllables. “So, a guy brings a coyote in. He gets the preference of how he wants it mounted, say out of the form book, standing on four legs turning. He might want more turn, looking the other way, nose up. Might want the front foot up. So I have to alter this form.”
If even carved stone appears to ripple under torchlight, and oil paintings breathe under glass, so too the skin of the dead, posture set by bent and turned wire, appears alive once again. Put on the spot, Sweet has trouble referring to himself as an artist.
“I’m a little shy,” says Sweet. “I want it to look pleasing and I want it to look correct. I don’t want anything that looks offensive. I won’t do things like squirrels playing golf. People call them novelty stuff. I turn that stuff away.”
But artist is still a holy word among some. Not just a corporately significant label, a Baphomet to worship. A description in fashion right now: A creative. As if everyone wasn’t.
That the compulsion bred by commercial advertising bears much in common with the weasel, Sweet would have to agree. They’ve got to sell regardless of whether someone is buying. It’s a survival strategy. Voracious.
…..
If Sweet has been around the taxidermy block too many times to count, Turner, of Mackenzie Turner Taxidermy in High Falls, a taxidermy shop and showroom opened less than a year ago, is the young blood in the business. Originally harboring plans for a future serving her country in the military, the nature lover’s path forked at 17 years old.
“I have a problem,” Turner explains, standing in her shop along the route 213. “I can’t feel thirst. I don’t get thirsty, so I have to keep track of it. I passed out from dehydration and my battle buddies just let me fall straight on the concrete.”
Disqualified from attending boot camp she came home at a loss to what her career would be. An enthusiastic hunter herself, a chance taxidermy experience opened her eyes to the financial possibilities.
“So then I worked for a gentleman, Jim Brown, for about five years.”
Now in friendly competition blessed by Brown, whose shop Wildlife Encounters is two miles away, Turner describes the process while looking at the wet furred head of an eight-point buck .
“I have to skin them, clean them, flush them, salt them, then I have to tan them. I do in-house tanning which is a little faster. You salt them usually two to three days. You want to make sure they’re completely rock hard dry. The skin is what you’re preserving, that the hair is attached to.”
Mackenzie sees what she does in traditional native American terms which says that animals are siblings, that even in death their life must be honored. It’s well known that every piece, fur, meat, bone, sinew must be used. Wastefulness is offensive. Disposability unspeakable. In Turner’s world even roadkill rates.
“It’s really sad but to me, when you see them dead on the side of the road, somebody obviously didn’t mean to kill them,” Turner says. “And I can preserve that life. It’s kind of an honor for me. For example, the doe and the fawn,” she leads us over to what amounts to a doe and fawn diorama. “I did that for my mother for Mother’s Day. That fawn was hit on the side of the road. But it was intact enough that I can preserve its life and say, hey, it didn’t die for nothing to rot on the side of the road.”
A back wall cluttered with award ribbons attests to the recognition of her talents in the short time Turner has been in the game but this seems to have been a phase of validation seeking. The 24-year-old is completely self-assured and has stopped competing for ribbons.
She shows off a habitat she has created, rocks, tree boughs and fall foliage, all painted foam and plastic to be mounted on the wall. The real thing would be too heavy. This then is the set and props for the action played out between two red foxes. One fox further along the bough turns to look behind at another fox. Turner explains the motivations.
“She is looking at him saying, ‘why are you so dang close to me?’ because they don’t travel that close,” Turner says. “That’s gonna be the male following her and she’s saying ‘Hey, buddy, back off!”
Turner knows that there is a perception that what she does is not normal. She laughs.
“But I do love it. I feel like a lot of people feel that it’s strange especially in the world that it is now where hunting and guns and everything like that is just being so banished.”
Turner does believe that hunting provides a better source of meat. “I’ll try to pick those older ones because those animals have been free to live their life how they want. They maybe bred. They weren’t packaged in these barns and fed hormones and not loved at all,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong. There’s some great farmers out there who treat their cattle amazing, but factory farms? I’m sorry. They’re disgusting. And I’d rather have an animal who lived a happy life.”
A mallard takes flight and spreads its wings forever while a coyote scans the bar top for cash tips. A large mouthed bass has long given up drinking water and a ruffed grouse seems gentle after all. A bobcat would leave if she could.
Over at the Westkill brewery taphouse of Broadway in midtown Kingston, the walls are alive with taxidermy. Friendly and approachable, owner Mike Barcone resembles a picture-book sportsman cum lumberjack, baseball-capped, flannelled and bearded. He describes the décor of his taphouse as turn of the century Catskills tavern boarding house – a species of farmer-run proto-airbnb from the 1800’s.
“We’ve kind of become a depository for taxidermy,” Barcone confides. “It started with this guy who was moving to Texas and he gave us that whitetail buck over there. But I find a lot of them at estate sales. I’m not a fan of things going into the landfill.”
None of the animals have their ears down, or their lips pulled back. None snarl. What taxidermists call straightforwardly enough, open mouth technique.
“It’s funny,” says Barcone. “I know a lot of hunters – I’m a hunter – a lot of them regret that choice when they get something done. I’ve never had anything mounted. A lot of the hunters that I encounter they’ll end up doing that. And they’ll say that’s not how it looks. They kind of feel weirdly bad about it.”
It’s the uncanny valley of the weird twins. And it’s why neither Turner nor Sweet will taxidermy anyone’s pets.
“I absolutely refuse,” says Turner. “You’re never going to make your animal look like your animal. If anybody wants that, I recommend them to use a freeze dryer. I say get your animal sleeping.”
In his bar, Marcone asks if I saw Herman the Ermine. I did not. I follow Marcone’s pointing finger.
Herman is cute. Standing up with short front legs for digging and the longer neck of what looks like a ferret with a little black eyes and a black nose. In life, Herman was a surplus killer. Now in death, Herman is an armatured simulacrum. Their snow-white winter fur coveted by the English royals, Ermines belong to the weasel family. An Ermine is a kind of stoat. Stories abound of stoats dancing to mesmerize their favorite prey, which are rabbits, before going in for the kill, looking to chew through the spinal cord. Because a stoat’s teeth are too short, the strategy is cruel.
The rabbits bleed out and die of shock while trying to make sense of the dancing stoat.
Herman is a murderer, preserved here on the wall.
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