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

Gould, the twenty-five-thousand-year-old icons resemble stick figures, static silhouettes. But Ken saw all kinds of clues in them. He saw how the animals looked in life and in death. He studied how they were shaded to determine their fur patterns. He believes that they were mostly light-colored, except for dark swaths along their humped backs, down their briskets, and ventrally, along their stomachs. He believes that they had short ear manes and dark throat manes and that their slender, pointy-snouted heads were disproportionally small and never held bolt upright, as they are in museums' mounted skeletons. He explained his scientific method as simply and as directly as a taxidermist would: "Two different caves. Two different time periods. One animal." He was using ancient reference to make an elk that looked as if it had rubbed off velvet four weeks ago. "There are some things I'll have to guess at, but it's an educated guess: dark animals have dark eyes; light animals, light eyes. It has to be scientifically sound—my interpretation of fact. Why would three generations of cave painters paint the same animal?" he asked.

Once he had answered these questions, he put a second sheet of plastic over the flat skeleton and drew on the muscles, so you could see the bones underneath. Imagine the human anatomy section of an encyclopedia where each layer of anatomy (the skeleton, the organs, the muscles, the skin) is on a separate sheet of Mylar. The sheets are then sandwiched together to make the body.

Finally, he took his knife and started carving the form out of big foam blocks. He carved muscles that flexed and muscles that rippled. He carved tendons that contracted and tendons that were relaxed. "It's like mixing a cake, a dash of this and a pinch of that. You know, you have to feel the consistency in your hands," he said offhandedly. "My take is half-cooked, and I'm still inventing the rest of it. A lot of people don't like the way I work. They want to know exactly how they can get my results without taking chances. There've been a lot of happy experiments in my shop."

I asked if he'd devised the method. "I don't think so. From the moment there was Styrofoam, people have been doing it."

After he carved the body, he cast the head and the hooves (moose) in polyurethane foam and ordered custom fallow deer eyes. Now he had to do the finishing work: texturize the antlers, cast the ears, and sculpt the nose patch. I sat in his studio for about a week, watching him, thinking about what Gould and all the other scientists, and even the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney, would think if they walked in here right now and saw this stunning beast. Frozen in mid-trot, it was crossing a creek to drive off a rival bull that was approaching its harem. Its small slender head was low and upturned, its nostrils flared. Its left foreleg was aggressively raised. Its hump and fringy mane were shaded as in the Chauvet cave paintings. I stood and stared at it for a long time, overwhelmed by its ability to evoke confrontation and tension. I let its presence pull me into the Holocene with the same brutal magic and tragic force that the French writer Charles Baudelaire said made dioramas as concentrated as theater. Then I imagined the conversation that Ken might have with Gould if this were a different era and the leading taxidermists and the most imaginative scientists were colleagues (or fierce rivals!)—coconspirators who shared a love of and curiosity about animals and, indeed, preserving them, so that someday, when they are gone, there will be a lasting record.

Ken has a gift for sculpture and for music. He could have, for instance, earned a living as a singer, but he doesn't like to be around drunk people, and he hates cigarette smoke. In 1993, he worked as a Roy Orbison impersonator, performing at clubs around Alberta. He was so spot-on that he received top billing over "Marilyn Monroe" and "Frank Sinatra." He got the job when a scout for Starz and Legends saw him sing "Only the Lonely" at a karaoke competition. The scout asked him to sing "Crying." He nailed it, and the company hired him on the spot.

Ken is always comparing taxidermy to karaoke; he is equally talented at both forms of mimicry. In fact, he is so good that his male rivals often try to get him disqualified from karaoke competitions because they claim he's a professional. Women swoon when they hear his imitation of Ian Gillian from Deep Purple. He's won several competitions with "Dream On" by Aerosmith because his voice can reach its super-high refrain: "Dream on, dream on, dream on." But his Roy Orbison is extraordinary.

Orbison was the crooner of all crooners. His falsetto was as distinctive as Irish elk antlers. His lonesome ballads pierce your heart with a tenderness and longing that would be utter camp if it weren't so genuine. The Beatles idolized Orbison. So did Bruce Springsteen. During his life, Orbison suffered several personal tragedies, so he knew a thing or two about loss—about people who vanish and don't come back. "They asked Roy Orbison how he wanted to be remembered, and he said, 'I just want to be remembered,'" Ken told me.

One night Ken, Colette, and I piled into Colette's pickup and went to a bar. It was in Stony Plain, thirty miles east of Alberta Beach, a place called the Stony Plain Hotel. Colette was meeting some friends here. It was cold and icy—an ordinary mid-February night in Alberta. We wore jeans and sweaters and heavy snow boots. A yellow sign outside said KARAOKE. We walked inside. There was a long wooden bar already decorated with shamrocks for St. Patrick's Day. Albertans with muttonchops and cowboy hats or wearing black leather pants and T-shirts sat at tables loaded with pitchers of Labatt's. The beer was cheap. Everyone was smoking.

Colette's