Beatrice and Virgil - Yann Martel [29]
The advantage of retaining the skull of an animal in its mounted version is that it can then be displayed open-mouthed, with its real teeth showing. Otherwise, on a mannequin head, the mouth must be sewn shut, or an elaborate mouth must be constructed, with artificial gums, teeth, and tongue. The tongue is the hardest animal part to get right. No matter the effort we put in, it always looks either too dull or too shiny. It's generally not a problem to keep the mouth shut--but what of the snarling tiger or the snapping crocodile, whose mouths are so expressive?
The pose given to the animal, at least the mammal or the bird, is a crucial matter. Standing straight, skulking, leaping, tense, relaxed, lying on its side, wings out, wings tucked in, and so on--the decision must be made early on since it will affect the making of the mannequin and will play a crucial role in the expressiveness of the animal. The choice is usually between the theatrical or the neutral, between the animal in action or the animal at rest. Each choice conveys a different feel, the first of liveliness captured, the second of waiting. From that, we get two different taxidermic philosophies. In the first, the liveliness of the animal denies death, claims that time has merely stopped. In the second, the fact of death is accepted and the animal is simply waiting for time to end.
The difference is immediately grasped between a stiff, glazed-eyed animal that is standing unnaturally and one that looks moist with life and seemingly ready to jump. Yet that contrast rests on the smallest, most particular details. The key to taxidermic success is subtle, the result obvious.
The layout of animals in a habitat setting or diorama is as carefully thought-out as the blocking of actors on a stage. When done well, when professionals are at work, the effect is powerful, a true glimpse of nature as it was. Look at the crouch of the animal at the river's edge, look at the playfulness of the cubs in the grass, see how that gibbon hangs upside down--it's as if they were alive once again and nothing had happened.
There is no excuse for bad work. To ruin an animal with shoddy taxidermy is to forfeit the only true canvas we have on which to represent it, and it condemns us to amnesia, ignorance and incomprehension.
There was a time when every good family brightened up its living room with a mounted animal or a case of birds, some representative from the forest that remained in the home while the forest retreated. That business has all dried up, not only the collecting but the preserving. Now the living room is likely to be dull and the forest silent.
Is there a level of barbarism involved in taxidermy? I see none. Or only if one lives a life entirely sheltered from death in which one never looks into the back room of a butcher shop, or the operating room of a hospital, or the working room of a funeral parlour. Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body. It is from there that both babies and cancers are born. To ignore death, then, is to ignore life. I no more mind the smell of an animal's carcass than I do the smell of a field; both are natural and each has its attaching particularity.
And let me repeat: taxidermists do not create a demand. We merely preserve a result. I have never hunted in my life and have no interest in the pursuit. I would never harm an animal. They are my friends. When I work on an animal, I work in the knowledge that nothing I do can alter its life, which is past. What I am actually doing is extracting and refining memory from death. In that, I am no different from a historian, who parses through the material evidence of the past in an attempt to reconstruct it and then understand it. Every animal I have mounted has been an interpretation of the past. I am a historian, dealing with an animal's past; the zookeeper is a politician, dealing with an animal's present; and everyone else is a citizen who must decide on that animal's future. So you see,