Still Life Melissa Milgrom (notion reading list .txt) 📖

out of nowhere. "Out of nowhere?" he exclaims. "I was a commercial taxidermist for fifteen years before I competed, and people would say to me, 'You came out of nowhere!' If you take a real good commercial taxidermist and open up his mind he's gonna win."

Ken was telling me this as we pulled out of Edmonton International Airport. We were in his pickup, a Toyota Velocity, driving northwest to his acreage in Alberta Beach. The highway cut through snow-covered prairies; the dim sun hung low in the sky; the gusty air was crisp and filled with swirling snow. "This is what I missed so much in DC," he said, his alert hunter's eyes scanning from side to side.

It was a balmy ten degrees that day in February 2005—not icy enough to plug your radiator into one of those parking lot heat boxes that keep Edmontonians' engines from freezing. I shivered in a down parka and heavy snow boots and slid the .410 automatic shotgun, which I had been sitting on, to the edge of my seat. A box of empty .270 casings lay on the armrest between us. Birds seem to recognize the roar of his engine and fly off the moment he approaches. Even the local animal rights activist keeps his distance. "He's kind of creepy," Ken said.

Ken hadn't trimmed his beard or cut his hair in weeks and superstitiously vowed not to until the World Taxidermy Championships in two months. His wife, Colette, called him "Grizzly Adams," and it wasn't an exaggeration. If he wasn't wearing a camouflage baseball cap that said north country taxidermy and a shirt emblazoned with the Smithsonian logo, I might not have known it was Ken—until he started to ramble in that dazzling Ken-like way. I didn't believe everything he said (Theodore Roosevelt shot and had someone preserve a porter on safari?), but I loved his unbridled enthusiasm, how he glided from topic to topic, equally excited about everything that entered his mind. First he mimicked Dr. Ruth, then, without pausing, he went on and on about a mammoth dug up recently in Japan. "I want to be the guy who puts the thing together!" he exclaimed.

A stand of frost-covered conifers caught his eye. "Killed my first moose with a bow and arrow right here in these trees," he said. "My only moose with a bow and arrow!"

The landscape was a vast expanse of white, blank as a sheet of paper. Ken noticed every track that marked every ditch and hill. "Saw a white wolf here this morning," he said, scanning shoulder to shoulder. "There's been a big cougar hanging around my place."

Then on to another topic: "As a big fan of Red Skelton, Howard Stern doesn't do a lot for me. If the only way to get attention is to shock people, then you better move to another town. The only way you shock someone with taxidermy is with the harshness of reality. A lion disemboweling a live zebra—that can be portrayed through taxidermy. You can do a doe killing its fawn with its hooves—that's the harsh truth."

He drove in silence for a few miles, then proclaimed, "Animal rights people are like streakers. It's a fad!"

Ken was consumed with the upcoming competition. He was entering Re-Creations again and was the big favorite. Some of his rivals had already dropped out; others had switched categories. "The world isn't ready for a Best of Show Re-Creation," he said, boasting that he had already written his acceptance speech. "I want to talk about Carl Akeley and the legacy that he created," he said. Sometime later he added, "People like Carl Akeley and myself lived in relative poverty at the start. He lived in a shack, and so did I. Reading his autobiography made me feel complete." Then, with a smile as broad as Alberta, he exclaimed, "I love how his two wives fought over him!"

This year Ken was pushing himself. Instead of re-creating something exotic such as the giant panda, he was resurrecting one of the most majestic and mysterious beasts ever to have roamed the earth: the prehistoric Megaloceros giganteus, commonly known as the Irish elk.

Irish elk weren't actually elk at all, and they weren't exclusively Irish. Taxonomically, they are classified as deer, giant extinct deer—the largest deer ever, except for the cervalces, which lived fifty thousand to ten thousand years ago. Irish elk were so regal and strange, in fact, that they seem almost mythical, like fantasy creatures dreamt up by the French primitive painter Henri Rousseau (1844–1910). So removed are they from our world that people who encounter their mounted skeletons in the National Museum of Ireland (which has the largest collection: 10 complete skeletons and the remains of 250 animals) often mistake them for a strange type of dinosaur or a moose. The reason they are called Irish elk is because their skeletal remains turn up primarily in lake sediment under peat bogs throughout Ireland. Their actual range extended from Ireland to western Siberia and parts of Asia.

Irish elk were designed for endurance: they were machines of incredible strength and dominance. Mature bucks stood seven feet at the shoulder and weighed nearly a thousand pounds. They had huge chests, colossal shoulders, lithe legs for speed, and strong bodies. But their most distinctive feature was undoubtedly their antlers. This stag had a massive rack—a twelve-foot spread from tine to tine—the largest antlers of any known deer, living or extinct. Nature's ultimate status symbol, these palmated billboards advertised great authority and power and sex (mostly to other deer). For centuries, people have lusted after these antlers. Nineteenth-century fossil hunters dredged every peat bog in Ireland looking for them; kings hung them in castles; people used them to decorate gateposts and bridges, hunting lodges and baronial halls.

These glorious beasts mystified even Ken, who has spent countless hours hunting whitetails and elk, imagining life in the early Holocene era, when Irish elk roamed. Science is still untangling their story: how did such a resilient species—this