5. THE CHAIRBITCH

AT THE 2003 World Taxidermy Championships, the English bird judge Jack Fishwick told me about a sculptor who was arguably the best taxidermist in the United Kingdom—this, even though she became disillusioned with taxidermy years ago and now calls herself an "anti-taxidermist." Her name is Emily Mayer, and she lives with her husband, John Loker (an abstract painter), and any number of Jack Russell terriers in the Norfolk countryside, surrounded by dairy farms. With her spiky black hair, deep voice, and BITCH T-shirts, the village locals used to call her "that strange lesbian dog owner." Now they know her as a taxidermist who is vaguely associated with the arts. "Vaguely," of course, isn't quite accurate, yet it's not entirely wrong either. Mayer is at the very center of the art world and also on its fringes. It seems like a curious place for a taxidermist to be.

At least Fishwick thought so, and he is a savage critic. But when he described Mayer's erosion-molded rats, he practically fogged up his binoculars. "The realism is uncanny," he gushed. "I mean the deathism." I shrugged. Racing off to England to see rats—even exceptional ones—wasn't on my agenda. Then Fishwick leaned in and whispered that Mayer was Damien Hirst's taxidermist: the woman who repairs the sharks, preserves the grizzlies, assembles the skeletons, and casts the cow heads for his multimillion-dollar artworks. I asked for her phone number.

Mayer also happens to be an artist in her own right, with a degree from the Norwich School of Art and Design and a body of found-fragment sculptures the Times of London once compared to Ted Hughes's poetry. In Fishwick's words, "Anywhere you cut Emily's finger off, it will say 'art.'"

For years, Mayer was the only woman taxidermist in England. She was also the first female chair of Britain's Guild of Taxidermists, the professional organization devoted to promoting taxidermy in the United Kingdom. When I finally called her, she invited me to attend its upcoming convention in Nottingham. I knew that taxidermy had evolved differently in Britain, where it is a cottage industry with long ties to modern zoology, than in the United States, with its predominant hunting culture, and I wanted to meet the descendants of early British taxidermists, some of the country's most passionate animal lovers.

We decided to spend a few days at her house getting acquainted before the guild show. She'd tell me about herself and erosion molding, the technique she's perfected. The process is incredibly complicated (as I'd see on a later visit) but yields astonishing results. There's no manikin, since there's no skin to stretch over it. Instead, the inside of the animal is replaced with silicone (rubber); only the fur remains. Hirst likes the method because he can display animals submerged in water rather than toxic formaldehyde, and they won't rot or become tattered, theoretically eliminating the need for replacement tiger sharks.

Because Mayer herself is so edgy, people tend to call erosion molding cutting-edge. It's more accurate to say that Mayer has rediscovered a forgotten technique (the Smithsonian has used it on some primates) and has pushed it farther than anyone: to the frightening point, in fact, where art is indistinguishable from life. Score one for taxidermy. Except for this: since erosion molding dispenses with the "derm" (and derm-less taxidermy is technically not taxidermy), taxidermists disdain her work as modelmaking. To Mayer, the distinction is semantic. "As long as you get the results, who cares!" she snaps with a dismissive air that belies how completely possessed she is by the absurd quest for utter realism.

Hirst once told me that Mayer is the only taxidermist who can "make it real." But real for Mayer—a perfectionist who is completely unsentimental about animals in art—is nothing like a diorama, with its idealized nature. Real is really real, and reality is unsettling, because it is often ugly and macabre. She and Hirst share this morbid fascination. Hirst's sectioned cows and bisected sheep are often nothing more than the cut-up animal, yet they are considered shocking. Encased in glass, they are the opposite of a diorama and yet convey the same powerful clashing of beauty and death. Mayer, like Hirst, loves to push the disturbance factor. As she puts it, "Animals die and kill things, and they lick their asses, and they shit. They just do stuff a taxidermist won't show. Taxidermists are all about the beauty of the animal. But I find beauty in death!"

If you met Mayer, you wouldn't doubt that. Ever since she was a kid, she's been wildly unconventional—not outright rebellious or disobedient, simply determined to pursue her own dreams. And beginning when she was twelve, one of her dreams was to be a taxidermist. Born in 1960, the Chinese year of the rat, Mayer grew up in Greenwich, when that section of southeast London was seedy and working-class and attracted bohemian artists such as her parents, who let her turn her bedroom into what she called her museum. Mayer, who is still a compulsive scavenger (and eBay fanatic), filled the tiny room with eggs, bones, and especially animals—living, dead, common, exotic, incubated, dissected, mummified, decomposed, fossilized, skeletonized. ("I was doing this before bloody Damien Hirst," she jokes.) She skinned her first mouse when she was nine and preserved—and ate—her first bird (a gull) when she was eleven, much to the disgust of her brother and sister. On a high school career form, she wrote "taxidermist, pig farmer, and jack-of-all-trades." "They thought I was taking the piss!" she says, using the Briticism for making a joke. "I was serious!"

She cares not a wink if people think she's mad; at least they remember her. "I can ring up people from way back in my past and say, 'Hi, I'm Emily the taxidermist,' and they go, 'Oh, right. Yeah.'"

The first time she rang me was to get my flight information, and it took me forever to figure out who was on the phone. The voice on the other end was so deep and gravelly from chain-smoking that I thought it was Jack Fishwick pulling my leg. It's only now that I'm not completely flustered by the words "Emily here." Before I hung up, I asked if she wanted anything from New York: bagels, perhaps, or an IV NY T-shirt. She gave it a quick thought, then said definitively, "Novelty sunglasses with holographic rolling eyeballs."

I left New York for England on September 14, 2003. I caught the Norfolk train from London and took it to Diss, the closest stop to Mayer's house. It was balmy outside, and Diss station (a cement platform with an espresso machine) was deserted except for a man reading a newspaper. I paced back and forth in the fragrant heat, waiting for Mayer. Then I glanced up and saw a tall, imposing figure with short-cropped hair, dressed all in black, striding purposefully down the platform. With the heavy black work boots and black wraparound sunglasses, it was hard to tell whether the person was a man or a woman. He or she did not resemble a taxidermist. Then I saw the butcher knives glinting in the sun. It was Mayer, and the knives were her earrings.

She kissed my cheek in a way that was more London artist than rural taxidermist. I dodged the knives (she sharpens them). Unsure of what to say, I handed her the holographic sunglasses. She passed me the wraparounds, and when she did, I could see her elegant facial bones and huge, darkly expressive brown eyes. She led me to her silver Citroën van and lit a roll-up, then we drove to her house in each other's sunglasses.

She sounded tough. Every other word was "fuck" or "bloody hell." Yet her lips trembled when she spoke, as if she had just consumed a pot of espresso, and peeking above her boots were her trademark hot-pink socks. At the crossroads of two dairy farms, in the minuscule village of Guilt Cross, we pulled into a gravel driveway that led to what looked like a huge brick factory (seventy-six windows and fifty-six radiators): Mayer's house. This 1906 workhouse hospital originally treated poor boys with tuberculosis. In old photos, the yard is filled with consumptive patients lying on cots, getting some fresh air (a common treatment for TB).

Now it contains animal corpses for Damien Hirst and Mayer's other clients, who include grieving dog owners, the bad-boy celebrity chef Marco Pierre White (who once sent a three-foot pike here by chauffeured car), and the odd skeleton collector, bat enthusiast, or lobster freak. When Mayer bought the workhouse in 1995, it was being used to store grain for neighboring farms. After years of renovations, she and Loker have transformed it into two artists' studios, each with its own kitchen, bedroom, and freezer—one for meat ("domestic"), the other for carcasses ("Emily's").

I followed Mayer inside. The place was dark and cold, a maze of long corridors. Her five terriers went nuts, running frenetic circles around her. "That's Alice. Her father fucked her aunt, which makes her inbred," she said with a jarring bluntness. Visiting Mayer for the first time is something like being at the dentist's after he's given you "sweet air" and you're smiling as he drills your teeth. I went upstairs to unpack. My room had a view of grazing Holsteins. On the nightstand was a worn paperback by Nicholas Parsons, Dipped in Vitriol, an anthology of "hatchet art reviews." The cover had a picture of a smashed tomato on it.

After lunch, she led me to her two-story studio, called Flying Bear. Upstairs, in a minimally finished attic that resembled an art gallery, are her sculptures. It is a group show by a single artist. I glanced at her seven iridescent rooks (taxidermic) perched on a weather-beaten fence post, then examined her crowlike bird surgically assembled out of scraps of old leather and bits of rusty metal. The crow, one of her found-object sculptures, was abstract yet somehow conveyed more life than the taxidermy. Indeed, it revealed someone who is uncannily in tune with animals—not just their glossy coats but the inner movement of every muscle, tendon, and bone.

Downstairs is her workshop, the kind of job shop where you'd expect to see a carpenter turn wood on a lathe or a mechanic rebuild an engine. It's a well-organized clutter of paints, saws, tools, drills, credit cards (used as resin scrapers), and Frankenstein-like chemistry setups with heat lamps, funnels, thermometers, handwritten formulas, and plastic bins for rotting carcasses: erosion-molding equipment.

We passed bird skulls and death masks and boxes of mummified weasels and stoats that she used to pick off of hedgerows as a kid (some now hung on her bedroom door). Above a window hung a mummified cat, all dried up and sinewy, like something you'd see in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And lying on the floor was the glossy head of a black horse that looked as if it had just been axed off. I glanced at its teeth, slightly visible through slack lips. Mayer grinned but offered no explanation.

"Ugh! That's dead!" I shrieked when we came upon a sleeping foxhound. The dog was curled up near a radiator. It looked so peaceful, so alive, that I petted it to be sure. It was as hard as fiberglass. "I like things in repose," she said coolly. "I like that disturbance factor. If it had glassy eyes, then you'd know it wasn't alive." The calico cat, on the other hand, was obviously dead. One of her failed experiments (she keeps them), it had shattered like a broken plate; furry shards lay on her worktable awaiting reassembly. "I had more of a headache with that fucking pussycat than I needed. It was a bloody nightmare!" she groaned.

Mayer does preserve dogs and cats. She preserves dogs and cats for the same reason other taxidermists are afraid to: she enjoys the challenge of replicating the expression of an animal that someone once knew intimately. (And since her mounts satisfy pet owners, she doesn't get stiffed—another reason taxidermists won't mount pets these days.) Mayer's canines are so spot-on that they even fool live dogs. Her terriers actually curl up with the cast foxhound and fall asleep. That said, Mayer will preserve pets for only one of two reasons: as a humanitarian gesture for a bereaved pet owner who absolutely needs an effigy of that animal to remember it by, and, of course, for art.

Outside Mayer's workshop is a small annex with huge doors that she had installed to accommodate massive carcasses. That day the room was blocked with an orange barrier that said no entry. It was her current Hirst project, which she was bound not to show until it was finished. I was disappointed. As captivating as Hirst's sculptures are while on exhibit at the Guggenheim in Bilboa, the Tate Britain, or any of the world's other leading bastions of contemporary art, I was far more interested in the process of how they are made—the messy, complicated part that a museum would never show. I mentioned how frustrating it must be to work in secret for years. She shrugged. "There [are] times when I'm glad my tongue is tied so I don't have to talk about it—especially at parties. It gets exhausting, people asking what's the biggest animal you've ever stuffed. So I don't say I'm a taxidermist anymore. If someone asks what I do, I just say I'm a sculptor and I occasionally work with dead animals," she said.

Taxidermists are notoriously cagey, but no one is cagey like Mayer, whose favorite aphorism is "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say" (E. M. Forster). Fortunately, you can see just about everything Mayer has ever said, because she is a master archivist who has been documenting her own life since she was thirteen. Her JPEG files of her work for Hirst, for instance, are practically in real time. "I keep a record of my breathing," she said, exhaling smoke.

Then she led me into the kitchen, covered the table with scrapbooks and old photos, and launched into a show-and-tell that lasted for three days and nights, not unpleasantly, I might add, except that Mayer does not pause for food. According to her two assistants, David Spaul and Carl Church, she can survive on a diet of nicotine and coffee. That said, Mayer's kitchen is actually pretty normal, except for the wineglass shelf with the kangaroo head, the wall of cutting boards that also has a ferret leash (in its original package), and the flower vase with a beard of twelve white mice strung together. "I did that for Damien's Christmas party," she explained. "The theme was beards." She grabbed two beers out of the fridge and flicked a lighter she called "the Elephant Man" because it depicted a naked guy with super-enhanced masculinity.

When I flipped through one of her childhood scrapbooks, labeled "Twenty Years a-Growing," I could see that she's always seen the world from a slightly twisted perspective. An early Christmas wish list had "braces" (to look American), "Beano books" (a classic comic book series for kids), and "a real syringe." There was a self-portrait of her head wedged in a trap, and the transcription of a childhood dream in which she fatally conked a puppy on the head, then revived it with a saucer of milk. "My bible when I was eight," she said, handing me a musty copy of Pets, Usual and Unusual by Maxwell Knight. "It brings me back," she said, eyeing me to see if I was damaging the spine. Not only did she describe her pet squirrels, hooded rats, and ferrets—in some cases she could produce the actual items. With a magician's flourish, she lifted an aluminum Jell-O mold off the table, and there was the injured rabbit she had tried to save by suturing. "I'm not good at throwing things away," she said, cocking her head to the side.

Her mother, Irmelin Mayer, is from Berlin and was a theatrical milliner in London. Her father, Tomi, immigrated to London from Mauritius and worked as a scenic artist for the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, painting backdrops for ballets and operas. "I've slept through more operas than you've been to in your entire life," she told me. Sometimes Tomi would bike home from work in his paint-splotched overalls carrying sugar cane he'd just picked up at a city market and say that he'd been to Mauritius. Other times, he'd bring home a finch that he had preserved in spirits at the scenic studios, and he and Emily would sit side by side in the kitchen sketching it. Both her grandfathers were physicians (one in Germany, the other in Mauritius). Her maternal grandmother was Lotte Pritzel, a well-known sculptor in 1920s Munich, whose erotically charged wax dolls inspired the Dadaists and the surrealist Hans Bellmer. Even the poet Rainer Maria Rilke said that he was moved to write part of his favorite verse, Duineser Elegien, after seeing Pritzel's haunting figurines. Pritzel died in 1952, eight years before Mayer was born. Her flamboyance, however, was legendary. If broad-brimmed hats were in style, Pritzel wore a broader one. She smoked cigarettes in the subway, embarrassing her daughter, whom Pritzel called bourgeois. "The rebelliousness skipped my mother and hit me. I've just been a bit different. I don't like to conform to what's expected," Emily said, raising an eyebrow.

At twelve, Mayer yearned to dig her scalpel into something more exotic than city sparrows and pigeons, so she took a job at Amazon Pets in southeast London, cleaning cages and exercising dogs and sheep. The owner, a falconer and part-time amateur taxidermist, imported amazing creatures that Mayer found incredibly alluring. Soon he taught her how to train an owl to fly to a lure, and he gave her taxidermy lessons. With some convincing, he also gave her his "dead inventory," which she smuggled home and dissected for practice.

Around then, she and a boyfriend went ferreting (hunting) for rabbits at night. They'd trap them in a purse, kill them, and eat them or feed them to the dogs. Mayer is not opposed to hunting for the table, and she has killed marketplace pigeons and rabbits for taxidermy, but she refuses to kill an animal only for taxidermy. The Akeley concept of dispatching the perfect specimen in order to make the perfect mount and then try to resurrect it revolts her. "Just leave it alive!" she says with disgust. She disapproves of fur farms and believes that roadkill is the most ethical meat you can eat. Her own specimens come from veterinarians, zoos, other taxidermists, and a network of obscure specialists, including skeleton assemblers, ornithologists, and lepidopterists. The horse intestines she uses to repair Hirst's Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything (a cow cut up and displayed in twelve separate glass cabinets; 1996) are from John Warman the knacker, whose family has been in the slaughtering business since the early 1800s. And her rats and mice are mostly cat fatalities.

She literally will not kill a fly. Once when I was at her house, she had just made a "blood run" (a resin blood puddle embedded with dead flies) for Hirst's landmark sculpture A Thousand Years (a rotting cow head on the floor of a giant glass case that is outfitted with a bug zapper and real flies, which eventually get sizzled; 1990). When I asked Mayer if she had killed the flies, she shot me a daggerlike look.

At seventeen, Mayer realized that her fascination with dead animals was more than a morbid predilection, perhaps even something of a gift. It was 1977, and she was waiting for the school bus, when she saw a dog get hit by a car and die. She carried the dog to the owners and gently broke the news. They were grateful, and soon Mayer was hanging out with them on their porch, drinking port, smoking pot, and complaining about how bored she was in school. ("I'm a maker of objects; I'm not intellectual," she says.) She wanted to drop out and become a taxidermist. "Do it then! Stop going to school and do it!" said the man, whom she describes as a rebel from a wealthy family. And so she did just that and has never regretted it, although one teacher told her she'd never be a taxidermist without advanced courses in biology and art. "And so I proved her wrong; I refused to be discouraged," she said.

That summer Emily worked as an apprentice taxidermist at World of Nature, in North Yorkshire, a zoo and a private museum housed in a converted mill. There was a window through which the public could watch taxidermy—or, rather, what minimally passed for taxidermy. World of Nature, you see, had the whiff of a circus. The owner was a former strongman who got his animals—including his pet lion, Libra—from his circus world contacts.

At World of Nature, Mayer learned how to skin eyelids, ears, and lips. She discovered, after skinning a rotten tortoise, that she had the requisite strong stomach for the task. Mostly she learned what not to do: break squirrel noses to enhance their cuteness; mount snarling stoats with one arm raised (like a toy); or implant teddy bear eyes in fox faces.

One day after she was told to flesh an elephant with a blunt skinning knife, Mayer quit. She returned to Greenwich for a time, then moved to Norfolk, where she freelanced doing taxidermy for schools and fox-hunt kennels and hung out at the pub with the local plumbers and builders. Then her efforts started to unravel. Glass eyes looked "glassy"; dog noses, dry; cat ears, opaque (when they ought to be translucent). And the faces—the tender windows onto an animal's soul—looked hard, not soft and fleshy. Mayer grew restless; the task of merging art and nature never seemed more illogical or unattainable. So she did something she had always found rather repugnant: she enrolled in art school. There she studied the energy of movement, discovering in sculpture what was missing in her taxidermy: her own interpretation.

It's as natural for a taxidermist to become a sculptor as it is for an actor to direct. Almost inevitably, taxidermists go the way of the nineteenth-century French animaliers (painters or sculptors of animal subjects) and cast animals in bronze. When Carl Akeley, Robert Rockwell, and David Schwendeman (briefly) each took up sculpture, they did bronze casting. To Mayer, however, nothing was more confining than what was essentially metal taxidermy. Until she met Damien Hirst, the only animal sculptures that inspired her were Picasso's assemblages.

Then one day she read about erosion molding. It was taxidermy in reverse: working from the outside of an animal in, dispensing with the derm. She explained the method to me using a dog as an example.

You take one dog, preferably dead, and position it in a way that you want the thing to end up looking. You can do it either fresh or frozen. Small mammals are better to do frozen, because they'll hold their shapes. Then you coat the dog's fur with silicone.

"What about rigor mortis?" I asked.

"It doesn't really last. Otherwise, people would die in really weird shapes, and you wouldn't be able to fit them in coffins, would you?"

After applying the silicone, you bolt a support-jacket mold around the coated carcass so it will hold its shape while the body decomposes, or "slips." The idea is to decompose the skin uniformly, so that when you remove the carcass from the mold, you are left with a hollow rubber shell that is the exact duplicate of the animal, with the fur embedded in it. A dog takes about a week to slip. It releases first from the belly, where there is a lot of bacteria. (The bacteria take longer to reach the ears, eyelids, toes, and extremities.) The smell is vile.

Mayer hand-casts every wart and freckle. So if a dog's belly has patches and splotches, she paints them into the mold. If it has one pink toe and three black toes, she casts each toe separately. Quite a bit of chemistry goes into erosion molding, because anytime you alter a batch of silicone resin to change the color, for example, or the tactility (the material's strength), the curing time may also change. Mayer has spent more than a decade fine-tuning the process. She knows how the material will react if changed by a tenth of a gram. "I can't have a piece for Damien discolor in five years," she says. "It has to be archival."

Her first erosion mold, in 1985, was for a pig farmer in Metfield, Suffolk (prime farm country), who wanted the head of his prized Berkshire-Peiron cross mounted as a memento. Mayer wanted to capture its fine details, but a pig's skin, like a primate's, has soft, hairless folds and wrinkles that would show imperfections if mounted conventionally. She suggested erosion molding but warned the farmer that she might "cock up." Mayer rarely cocks up. The pig was fabulous; the farmer was ecstatic. Then Mayer enrolled in art school and forgot all about erosion molding until Damien Hirst hired her to make a replacement severed cow head for A Thousand Years.

That was in 1998, five years after Marco Pierre White introduced them. The first animal Mayer mounted for Hirst was an upright grizzly bear posed in the Victorian style for Last Night I Dreamed That I Didn't Have a Head (Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao). (She used conventional taxidermy because the bear was too huge to erosion mold at that point in her career.) When Hirst went to Norfolk to inspect it, Mayer was expecting him to be "a right jumped-up little asshole that was really up himself." Instead, she found him to be "really straightforward, what you see is what you get kind of thing." While they were drinking beer in the garden, Hirst mentioned a concept similar to one he describes in his book On the Way to Work (2002). Mayer just happened to have a tiny plasticine cow on a cross that she had made, and she took it out to show him. Synchronicity! Hirst yelled, "Fucking hell! Fucking hell!"

For Mayer, beginning to work with Hirst was a turning point. The grizzly led to shark repairs, skeleton work, and eventually more cow heads for A Thousand Years (he changes them periodically). The pay was "phenomenal." Better yet, she got to live inside Hirst's mind during his meteoric rise to fame, when his controversial work was shaking up the art world in a way that may sound familiar today but was absolutely shocking then. One art critic described the Hirst phenomenon like this: "Each time he showed a new work it was as if some art-world Jack the Ripper had perpetrated one more outrageous crime." Mayer was stirred by the experience. She saw Hirst's work as a sophisticated version of what she had done as a child, and she saw him as a kindred spirit. "My heart went faster. My mind went Flip, flip, flip: My God, he's right! Oh, fuck! It's just about putting things together and not trying too hard to make them into a story. I've always been a maker of objects. Damien put them into a context. The pig cut in half—fantastic! You don't meet many people with that same fascination with dead things ... He made it permissible to use that kind of language. He's allowed me to experiment to get the results he wants, and it's been a steep learning curve—an armory of techniques. It's been brilliant for me."

She dug up the original work order for her first severed cow head. It said, "Notes on head: real skin, eyes to look fresh, alive; exposed flesh on base of neck molded. In the round; to be displayed on its side." At that time, erosion molding was still nasty, trial-and-error work. She explained the risks to Science, Hirst's company in Bloomsbury. The company said, "We need this head, please!" It turned out to be the most beautiful severed cow head with an exposed bloody spinal bone imaginable. Other taxidermists would have driven it straight to Science. Mayer entered it in the 1998 guild show. It caused a minor sensation but won not a single ribbon. Everyone agreed that it was clever—clever, that is, for something that had been molded. Nevertheless, the guild published a photo of it in its annual magazine Taxidermist with this comment: "You can see it as part of a Damien Hirst show a year from now." The magazine thought it was a joke.

The guild show started that afternoon. The three-day conference was being held at the University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington, an agricultural college, and Mayer was giving the death mask demonstration with a taxidermist from the National Museum of Scotland.

While Mayer packed, I flipped through back issues of Taxidermist. Articles by zoologists, museum taxidermists, and curators filled its pages. I read about preserving Mediterranean spur-thighed tortoises, refurbishing antique giraffes, and casting lightweight rocks for dioramas. The guild members sounded serious, but they didn't seem to take themselves seriously. One contributor actually called taxidermists "pathetic."

The guild takes trips to fascinating places: museums and estates whose collections were amassed in the 1800s by wealthy enthusiasts, big-game hunters, and field naturalists who hunted on other continents for specimens to bring back to England. During the early 1800s, Britain dominated the race to acquire as many new species for its national collections as possible. Not only did the British collect specimens with imperial zeal, but they also formed brilliant theories about them. By contrast, their American counterparts were known mostly as specimen providers (hunters), with some important exceptions. England was also the place where artistic taxidermy advanced after London's Great Exhibition of 1851, the first world's fair. The guild members had giant shoes to fill if they ever hoped to live up to their forebears, the best of whom had been granted the royal warrant "Naturalist, by appointment to his Majesty the King."

That said, only England could produce such animal fanatics—and then turn them into enemies. You see, the early taxidermists who served science at the British Museum and the ones who prepared artistic mounts for public display were often bitter rivals. As a result, many private museums and stuffed menageries sprang up throughout England, each one as idiosyncratic as the person upon whose collection it was based. These are the places the guild likes to visit.

One year the guild visited the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum at Tring. It's now a branch of the Natural History Museum, but in 1892 it opened as the private collection of the ardent self-taught ornithologist Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, son of the banking magnate Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who gave him Tring for his twenty-first birthday. The baron used his vast fortune to hire hundreds of people to hunt for rare birds and butterflies throughout the world to add to his collection. He also liked to outbid the British Museum at auction. The baron was particularly fond of the most striking of feathered wonders, the bird of paradise, and he also loved tortoises. But he didn't just want to observe them; he wanted to own them—all of them. In the 1890s, he devised an unsuccessful plan to bring every turtle from the Galápagos Islands back to England, angering other naturalists who didn't believe his explanation that he was saving them for science. During the 1920s, his collection of 225,000 stuffed birds and live menagerie drew people from near and far.

In 1932, Rothschild, disinherited for eschewing banking in favor of birds, became embroiled in a museum acquisition that would make a gripping soap opera. Rothschild, who was being blackmailed by an ex-mistress, was forced to sell his beloved birds to the American Museum of Natural History for a dollar a bird, or $225,000. At the time of the sale, the baron broke down and wept; parting with the birds of paradise alone proved far more painful than parting with the mistress. The museum was unrelenting, but Rothschild got the last laugh. According to one account, when the AMNH ornithologist arrived at Tring to pack up the birds, he realized that none of them had been cataloged or labeled. There wasn't any need; the baron knew the Latin name of every bird by heart. When the crated birds arrived in New York, they filled an entire storeroom.

Rothschild died in 1937. He bequeathed Tring to the British Museum, which owned it until it split with the Natural History Museum in 1963. Today Tring, the NHM's bird annex, contains the world's greatest collection of birds—nearly a million skins, including Charles Darwin's Galápagos finches (which he collected on his historic voyage on the Beagle), as well as 800,000 eggs and more than 2,000 nests. (It includes numerous stuffed dogs, too.) When the guild visits Tring, members get to go behind the scenes where all the scientific research takes place.

The guild also has gone to the Powell-Cotton Museum in Kent. Major Percy Powell-Cotton (1866–1940) was a rich hunter who survived a lion attack in Africa, then re-created other lion attacks at his home. Powell-Cotton hired the best British firms to preserve his kills, which he shipped home from Africa and Asia. He pioneered the diorama in England, eventually turning his house into a private museum where people could feast their eyes on the glorious scenes where he hunted.

However, the guild trip I thought sounded most exciting was the one to Charles Waterton's estate, Walton Hall, in West Yorkshire. Waterton is known as taxidermy's "eccentric genius." In the 1820s, Walton Hall, built on an island in a lake, was his Xanadu—the antithesis of a museum, with its storerooms of lifeless skins. Here all the animals lived harmoniously with Waterton as a landlocked Noah who communed with nature as only a Victorian British taxidermist could. He built stables so that his horses could converse, kennels so that his hounds could look out on the land, and cozy pigpens that absorbed warm sunlight—all while he, an ascetic Catholic, slept on the floor with an oak block for a pillow. At Walton Hall, birds could have sex in a starling tower that was cleverly hidden by tall yew-hedges, then raise their young on the lake where rowing was forbidden. What was so eccentric about that? But how else would you describe someone who once tried to persuade vampire bats to suck his toes as a means of bloodletting? Or who built a three-mile-long brick wall around his property to keep out poachers and their deafening guns, thereby establishing the first nature preserve in England?

Taxidermists knew Waterton as the fiery squire who pleaded with them to go outside and study animals in the wild. In this, he prefigured William Hornaday and Carl Akeley by nearly a century. Most other people knew him as the author of the Victorian bestseller Wanderings in South America, his remarkable, if discursive, account of his barefoot trek through Guiana, where he encountered the rarest, most colorful birds and beasts, which he killed and brought home. (The epilogue of the 1889 edition has a treatise on taxidermy.) Sometimes Waterton was an unreliable narrator, interchanging the names jaguar and tiger, chameleon and lizard, and puma and lion. But his vivid prose, painstaking mounts, and daring adventures—shooting deadly vipers, finding the curare used to poison arrow tips, and riding a thirty-foot caiman (perfectly safe if you avoid the teeth and tail)—provided Victorians with a glimpse of the marvelous unknown, a place they longed to see, if only from an armchair.

About taxidermy, Waterton said, "You must possess Promethean boldness, and bring down fire and animation, as it were, into your preserved specimen. Repair to the haunts of birds on plains and mountains, forests, swamps, and lakes and give up your time to examine the economy of the different orders of birds."

Waterton was antiestablishment in a way that is characteristic of all taxidermists—that is, he sided with animals over people, especially museum men, who tagged and labeled birds as if they were machine parts. Nothing depressed Waterton more than a beautiful bird badly mounted, something he called "a hideous spectacle of death in ragged plumage." His own birds blazed with vitality, as they did in the jungle. No one could get a hummingbird's gorget to sparkle quite like Waterton. Yet even he was capable of falsifying nature to make a point or stir up controversy. Take, for instance, his most famous mount—a "taxidermic frolic"—called the Nondescript.

In the early 1800s, whenever new species were brought back to England, they were given two-part Latin names that typically incorporated the name of the discoverer or the person who had funded the expedition. Waterton despised binomial naming because it made the fascinating study of wildlife arcane and elitist. To him, nothing was less truthful (or more self-serving) than naming one of God's wonders after a person, especially if that person was a rich collector or a hunter who knew virtually nothing about the species. He called binomial naming "pseudo-classical phraseology." Once, while flipping through a book of bird plates with scientific names, he said, "I find that a hawk is called the 'Black Warrier,' and that the Latin name ... given it is 'Falco Harlani.' Pray, who or what is 'Harlani'? A man, a mountain, or a mud-flat? Is 'Black Warrier' a Negro of pugnacious propensities?" His own system, called complimentary nomenclature, used local names and characteristics to describe species. This was a perfectly logical approach, except that Waterton made it really confusing. Even his admirers had no idea what he meant by names such as Hannaquoi, Camoudi, Salempenta, or Coulacanara, each of which might refer to a bird, a plant, or a snake.

The Nondescript was even more perplexing. It was a hairy little mannish ape that Waterton said he had procured in Guiana while hunting for specimens. The problem was that it was just a head. Waterton had discarded the body in the jungle (too heavy to carry), making it impossible to identify the riveting new species. Eventually, he admitted making the Nondescript out of two red howler monkeys that he had manipulated to resemble a particular customs official. In the meantime, however, he used a picture of the Nondescript as the frontispiece of Wanderings, creating a buzz that kept the book in print for fifty years.

Waterton really liked only his own taxidermy, claiming that all other specimens were "wrong at every point." He refused to show any mount at his museum that he deemed inexact and unfaithful—which is another way of saying that he displayed only his own mounts. He snubbed every grand exposition.

That said, he was a good taxidermist—perhaps too good, for his taxidermy innovations, as heartfelt as complimentary nomenclature, were too tedious to spawn any followers. For Waterton, every feather, every strand of hair needed tending, a monotony for which he alone had the patience. His method for preserving quadrupeds for natural history cabinets was torturous. First he removed every claw and bone. Then he peeled off the entire skin and pared it down with a knife until it was paper-thin. Even the ears had to be split (inner and outer parts), treated, and seamlessly reassembled. He dispensed with all internal wires when mounting birds and used the treated skin alone, instead of the rag-and-sawdust method. He renounced arsenic. To anyone who found these methods mind-numbing, Waterton quoted Horace: "By laboring to be brief you become obscure." He obviously knew what he was doing, because nearly all his mounts, including the Nondescript (now at the Wakefield Museum), have survived, unlike his wearisome methods. A person would have to be insanely obsessed to actually rebuild a bird feather by feather. Yet in this, Waterman reminds me a lot of Emily Mayer.

Mayer is still racing around her house, putting clipboards, programs, and death masks and agendas into a box to take to the conference. I ask her what she is entering into the competition. "A dog in a suitcase," she says matter-of-factly.

She isn't joking. She explains with a steely empathy how over the years, she's seen plenty of dogs in suitcases. Someone's dog dies, and the owner, who has a parental attachment to the animal, can't bear to part with it. So the dog gets enshrined in a suitcase and is dropped off at the vet's with Mayer's phone number on it. Mayer's entry is a tiny erosion-molded terrier with closed eyes, set snugly in a small suitcase—an open casket of sorts. She calls the piece Last Journey, Precious Cargo.

Mayer joined the guild when she was nineteen and hardly misses a conference. This is her first one as chair, and I'm curious to see her in that role. A death-fixated anti-taxidermist who calls taxidermy "contrived" and "tedious" seems like the wrong person to lead the guild.

Mayer being Mayer, she has no intention of letting anyone call her "chair." Right after she accepted the post, she had a letter published in the guild journal renouncing the term. "I am two-legged and warm-blooded not four-legged and wooden," she explained. She also rejected "Chair Person" ("I deplore this kind of P.C."), and "Madam Chair" ("smacks of grey hair and tweeds"). "We are all of mankind so chairman is fine thank you. Chairbitch is OK too." This was Mayer's acceptance speech.

The two-hour drive from Mayer's house to Nottingham has innumerable roundabouts and T junctions; it's like driving a maze. Even so, Mayer can steer, smoke, and answer calls from Hirst's company, Science, simultaneously. Still, I keep thinking about an article I just read by a taxidermist who warned, "It is a known fact that when a taxidermist is driving a car at speeds of 50 mph-plus, the car often lurches to an abrupt and inexplicable halt. He then rushes from the car, sometimes running back 200 yards or more at high speed, and returns holding a dead bird." Luckily, we don't stop for roadkill and reach the Sutton Bonington campus at 4:30 P.M.

We check into a dormitory, which is next to the lecture hall where the conference is being held. I haven't stayed in a dorm since college, and I'm surprised by the musty smell and the grim sparseness of my room, with its faded curtains and bedspread and its fluorescent lights. On the bed is the room's single amenity, a disposable paper bathmat I'm supposed to bring to and from the showers—the communal block of showers I'll be sharing with forty British taxidermists for the next three days. Watching the small bed sink under the weight of my carry-on bag makes me long for the Crowne Plaza in Springfield, Illinois, with its sparkle and glitz, where the bathroom was mine alone and the closet could accommodate my evening gown.

We unpack and cut through the ivy-covered brick campus to register for the conference. I glance around for people carting stuffed pumas or grizzly bears, or perhaps an alligator packed in fake water. There isn't a hedgehog, a rook, or a stoat in sight. I think we are in the wrong place. Then Mayer leads me inside, where a disheveled man with the gruff, boisterous voice of a pirate (and the broken teeth and scraggly red beard to match) sits in a quiet hallway registering a woman's "bits and pieces" (a hare and a buzzard) into the juried competition. The man's name is Kim McDonald, and he is the guild's legal expert, the person whom Mayer relies on when she needs to know the legal status of, say, a tawny owl on eBay mounted before 1947 (legal) or a tawny owl mounted last month (a punishable crime). This area of the law is very complicated, because protected species vary from country to country, as do the fines. Although guild members are mostly good blokes who comply with cites, some taxidermists do not. In fact, next to drug trafficking, animal smuggling is one of Britain's most persistent crimes.

British taxidermists have always had a fair share of forgers and smugglers among them, and over the years London's Metropolitan Police Wildlife Crime Unit has seized tens of thousands of endangered species being sold illegally as taxidermy, Chinese medicine, and luxury fashion accessories. One of the worst taxidermy crimes in recent history occurred in 2000, when London's best-known taxidermist, Robert Sclare, who runs the shop Get Stuffed in Islington, was charged with illegal possession of endangered wildlife. Sixty specimens were seized, including a stuffed tiger cub (less than a week old); tiger, leopard, wolf, and chimp mounts; gorilla skulls; an elephant foot and tusks; and rare lemurs and birds of prey. Sclare was found guilty on twenty-nine counts of permit forgery and twelve counts of illegally displaying animals. He was sentenced to six months in prison. When I told Mayer I wanted to visit the shop, she forbade me to do so, because that incident has given taxidermy a bad name.

Mayer stands in line, holding Last Journey, Precious Cargo, while the woman in front of her registers. "It's the first time I've done this," the woman says timidly. She needs to find a place to sleep, she says. "You can share a room with me," McDonald purrs, flashing a big, gap-toothed grin. Then he sends the woman upstairs to drop off her mounts for judging. When it's Mayer's turn, McDonald shouts with a brogue, "Bloody Chairbitch and you only bring one specimen! Go put a red dot on the bloody nose of your terrier!"

When the guild was established in 1976, taxidermy was floundering. It was an era of ecological awareness, and the big museums, having already plundered every jungle and ice floe for specimens, needed no more. So they began to ax taxidermy posts and shut down their workshops, sending their taxidermists off to find work at the big commercial firms, most of which were barely solvent, because hunting had dropped off, too. At the time, an American taxidermist passing through England called taxidermy a profession fraught with apathy and isolation. A group of British museum taxidermists, troubled by all this, got together and formed the guild.

In 1976, the guild may have had lofty ambitions, like those of the World Taxidermy Championships, but the people trickling into the hall now—museum, commercial, and amateur taxidermists; people interested in modelmaking and natural history; passionate ornithologists, lepidopterists, and skeleton collectors; people who spend a great deal of time pondering life forms—are exceptionally laid-back. (Had Charles Waterton walked in here, I bet he would have preached fire and animation.) These people are, for the most part, Mayer's friends and colleagues, people she relies on for specimens, reference, and technical advice. At Hirst openings, Mayer is known as a taxidermist who is an artist; here she is known as an artist who is a taxidermist. She's known some of the guild members for more than thirty years. They call her "wild," "artsy," and a bit "daft."

I think about all the changes Mayer must have seen since she joined the guild in 1977: older museum taxidermists have retired and died; younger taxidermists have quit taxidermy to earn a living doing something else. Some of them are at the convention, including Derek Frampton, a former Natural History Museum taxidermist who now uses his sculpting skills to make props and robotic creatures for movies such as the Harry Potter series. He has also prepared study skins and dogs for Tring. "Now I'm one of the senior members," Mayer says with a bittersweet intonation. "At least they haven't kicked me out yet."

The turnout is low this year, only 40 out of 139 paid members (in 1990, the membership was nearly 300). Even so, the group has a camaraderie that Mayer finds genuine and uplifting. "I love the passion and the obsession—you know, the striving for," she says. "And I love the company." Because of this, and because of the college campus, the show feels like a reunion. It is as informal as a pub crawl. The ballot box is a plastic ice cream container. The "trade show" is a trade stand (Jack Fishwick's artificial snow and resin icicles and a table of tanned pelts). The nametags are totally unnecessary—everyone is chummy—but Mayer still growls, "Anyone without a badge is going to get a severe slapping!"

I wander around, listening. No one is talking about shoddy craftsmanship or how it's unnecessary to hunt animals for taxidermy—two topics that perennially come up at guild shows. Instead, I hear this:

"I've seen a bloke undress a girl with a bullwhip."

"I like a little pain."

"Her clothes were on with Velcro. She didn't have a wink on her. Most guys went up to inspect the body. You're talking twenty feet!"

While more people register, Mayer and I sit in the cafeteria, eating our dinner of lamb and potatoes. Unlike the WTC, with its religious revival overtones, there are no place mats with the NRA logo (indeed, many guild members oppose hunting, which in England primarily means foxes). No one says the Lord's Prayer. In fact, no one mentions taxidermy at all except to cancel tonight's slide show: "Given the late hour, we'll go to the bar and relax and have the slide show tomorrow."

The campus bar radiates blue like an aquarium. It has blue walls and blue tables and is lit with fluorescent sconces. It pulses with pop music—Sheryl Crow, the Rolling Stones. I find Mayer drinking pints with her mates, Jack Fishwick and her two assistants, Dave Spaul and Carl Church (both former welders). They exchange kisses, arms draped over each other's shoulders.

I pull up a chair next to Fishwick. The last time I saw him was at the WTC. He was wearing a baseball cap and binoculars and was almost arrested for birding too close to Lake Springfield's power plant. He told the cops, "You can't arrest me—I'm a judge!" They let him off. Taxidermy's British ambassador, Fishwick works for museums throughout Europe and judges international taxidermy competitions, where his ornithological expertise and unsparing critiques are legend. Even though he opposes hunting ("It's hard without a gun") and he believes that taxidermy is "not art," American and European taxidermists alike respect him (which for taxidermists, who are notoriously jealous, says a lot). Although I yearned to go back in time and watch herons (while reading Virgil) with Charles Waterton high up in a lofty tree, I was just as happy to be sitting here drinking pints with Fishwick. I love to listen to bird taxidermists describe birds, because their language is exacting and their observations are keen and passionate. Fishwick looks up, grinning, and says, "I've a tattoo of a ship on my stomach—see if you can find the mast." Riotous laughter erupts as I turn red and guzzle my beer, trying to regain my composure. The beer, however, gives me the courage to change the subject and ask Church and Spaul about Damien Hirst.

"He's cooked [dinner] for me!" says Spaul, beaming. "I get a big buzz out of just knowing that I've contributed to [his art]. I've signed it all—embedded in the plastic ... It's just a big buzz!"

More people join us. Everyone is drinking pints. Mayer tells them that I'm a journalist writing a book about taxidermy, which puts me on edge. Taxidermists often distrust the press, and for good reason. They resent the media's morbid depictions and how the media tend to focus on unscrupulous taxidermists, such as Sclare of the Get Stuffed shop, rather than on those whose passion evokes that of the early naturalists, for whom taxidermy was a zoological tool. Because of this, I expect the conversation to become guarded. I am wrong.

These serious naturalists do not want to talk about the Linnean Society or Captain Cook's voyage in the Endeavour. Instead, they talk about their most bizarre jobs, and they play up all the blood and guts—something their American counterparts would never do in front of a reporter. I'm surprised that they are being so explicitly gross around someone they've just met. I'm also surprised by my own reaction. Soon I'm laughing convulsively at stories I would have found repulsive a year ago: the menacing poodle made into a therapeutic rug to help rid a boy of his fear of dog bites; the man who asked to have his amputated leg made into a lamp stand; the pickled terrier whose sunken eyes needed replacements. They chat about blindfolded taxidermy: eating the specimens!

The women are as raunchy as the men. Ruth Pollitt, then the National Museum of Scotland's skinner, is describing her job. "I do all of the measuring, pickling, tanning, and finishing of the study skins and some skins for exhibitions, from mice to elephants. I've worked on three thousand mammals in ten years," she boasts. This year alone, Pollitt has prepared 360 felines for the museum's new Cats of the World Hall. That fact is astounding; I want to hear more. But Ruth is already on to another topic: the time she (and five others) skinned a giraffe in six hours. It was a highlight of her career as a skinner, and I sit with open notebook, eager to get it all down. But she's not talking to me specifically; she's talking to the taxidermists in the room, two of whom work with her at the museum. So she says instead, with a huge grin, "Giraffes are very well-endowed." Loud laughter. My ears perk up.

Taxidermists can talk endlessly about animal genitalia, penis bones in particular. I was surprised to learn that certain mammals have bones in their penises, and taxidermists collect them as trinkets or curiosities. Even the Schwendemans and Mayer have raccoon baculums in their studios, which Mayer says are fertility talismans. (After the show, I gave a raccoon baculum to a friend who had unsuccessfully attempted in vitro fertilization, and she got pregnant the next month.) As it happens, in addition to penis bones, Pollitt collects testicles, kangaroo scrotums, and other sexual things. "I collect the testes. I put them on a metal tray and prepare them later. We keep the penis bones. We have a national penis collection. The National Penis Collection of Scotland," she says, pausing, everyone doubled over in laughter. "You have to watch your bollocks in that place!"

A sociologist might say that taxidermists are purposely lurid, because by making fun of themselves, it's somehow less hurtful when outsiders call what they do strange. I'm sure there's some truth in that, but I honestly think everyone in the bar that night was simply drunk and having a good time. And because most guild members get their specimens from natural death, that also eliminates the guilt factor. Still, I had made a great effort to come to England to attend this show so that I could learn something about taxidermy. I had high hopes of getting some real information the next morning at the death mask demonstration.

When I walk in, Peter Summers, a soft-spoken, self-effacing taxidermist with the National Museum of Scotland, is adjusting his latex surgical gloves. On the lab table to his right is a mangy black domestic cat—the demonstration victim. The method Summers is about to demonstrate is the one he's currently using at the museum for the Cats of the World Hall. Mayer, who hasn't done a death mask in fifteen years, will assist him.

Dressed in a black T-shirt with white handprints over her breasts, Mayer scans the place to see if everyone has arrived, then she introduces the competition judges. Everyone boos. Someone shuts off the lights, and Mayer sits in the dark, watching Summers through the holographic rolling-eyeball sunglasses. The first thing he does is deftly rub clay over the cat's face to flatten its fur. The idea is to capture a fresh imprint of its facial muscles. He says, "The next thing we're going to do is..."

"I'd reposition the lips now," Mayer interjects.

"I'd inject fluid into the eyeballs now," he continues.

He fastens a foam collar around the cat's neck to immobilize it while he skillfully drips plaster onto its face until it resembles a gargoyle.

"Stop it! Don't put any more on!" scolds Mayer.

"He's enjoying himself!" a taxidermist named Colin yells from the back of the auditorium. "No lumps in the plaster!"

"No one makes lumpy plaster but you, Colin!" Mayer shouts back.

"Peter makes lumpy plaster!"

Mayer reaches her finger into a jar of wave-and-groom hairdresser's wax that Summers is using as a separator (to keep the fur from sticking to the plaster) and works a little into her own spikes. Nobody is taking notes.

"I think it's dry," says Colin.

"It's not," insists Summers.

"You're making a mess," says Colin.

"Disaster!" says Summers with resignation. "I don't know what to say except sorry."

After the failed demonstration, Mayer's assistants, Church and Spaul, present slides from the WTC. I'm curious to hear a British perspective on an American show. They deliver.

Church: It's a big show and they take it very seriously. They're great people, but they haven't got a sense of humor, so I wouldn't joke with them.

Spaul: Food is cheap. Taxi's cheap. Go to Wal-Mart. I got really nice jeans for eight dollars. The bar is next to nothing. I gave up drinking for five years until I went there, and then I took it up again.

At the World Show, mammal judges use a checklist of 139 items to score a mount. Here things are far simpler and for a reporter an utter joy. The guild has one criterion for judging mounts: is it an acceptable standard?

Sable: yes.

Zebra: yes.

Sika: no.

In the end, Spaul wins Best Mammal, earning his accreditation (more important than a rosette because he has demonstrated that he can master the techniques established by the guild). Mayer takes second place with the dead terrier. Fishwick's kookaburra wins Best Bird and Best in Show. That night in the cafeteria, Mayer presents the awards in what can only be called a non-ceremony. "Your certificates are over there," she says flatly, pointing to a stack of loose papers. "Otherwise, it would take all night."

After dinner, Mayer says, "Happy drinking. See you at the bar." We all trudge to the bar. I'm starting to wonder whether I should have stayed at Mayer's house and read about taxidermy in the guild journal. As much as I love English beer, I hadn't come here for the pints. I had come to see if I could gain a deeper understanding of why people are drawn to taxidermy. I'm frustrated because the people in this room could provide insight into that question—if they are willing. I'm about to give up when someone points to a table near the bar, where a man with wavy silver hair, a long sharp nose, and piercing blue eyes is sitting nursing a pint. He has on a gray T-shirt and jeans, and in the blue glow of the blue bar, everything about him looks blue, including his skin. His name is David Astley, and he is one of the last living links to British taxidermy's glory days—and my last chance to connect the guild with the past. I grab my notebook, wander over to his table, and tell him about my research. He nods and invites me to sit down.

In the mid-1970s, before he was in the movie The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, about the Sex Pistols, Astley was a taxidermist at Rowland Ward's, the firm established by England's most famous taxidermist (no relation to Henry Ward). Ward's mounted trophies for every elite hunter from Winston Churchill and British royalty to General Francisco Franco and a long list of movie stars. The firm also acted as an agent for museums and rich collectors, procuring polar bears, dugongs, and great auks (real and fake) for their dioramas and trophy rooms. Commercial firms such as Ward's flourished in England at the turn of the twentieth century. After World War I, however, only a few leading firms survived. Restrictions on the wanton slaughter of migratory birds, for instance, were starting to be imposed, feathered millinery was passé, and taxidermy was slumping. Ward's hung on until 1983.

Taxidermists often call Rowland Ward the British Carl Akeley. But if Akeley was Henry David Thoreau, Ward was Stephen King. He loved the sensation of the savage beast. His mounts were purposely terrifying. He had a gift for creating narrative tension by manipulating a predator's whiskers and spreading its paws to make the claws look like they could rip you to shreds. His open-mouthed snarl was peerless. From 1862 to 1890, Ward displayed groups of aggressive deer and leaping tigers (and a leopard poised to maul a dark-skinned toddler) at all the big European expos, where Victorians lined up to be shocked and entertained by his blockbuster thrillers. He died a rich man.

Ward called his London shop his "Zoological Studios" and "Gallery of Natural History." The public preferred "the Jungle." World-famous explorers, travelers, and sportsmen all gathered there to swap tales of stalking African lions or shooting Bengal tigers. In its heyday, Ward's received an order for sixty rhinos, dispatched during a single expedition.

Ward forbade photography in his shop (trade secrets, I assume). His autobiography is incredibly scarce because he published only fifty copies himself. However, Pat Morris, the retired University College London zoologist who would be giving the guild show's closing lecture, spent twenty years gathering materials on Ward, which he wove together in a self-published monograph, Rowland Ward: Taxidermist to the World. And now seated here in the bar is David Astley, an actual former Ward's employee.

In an old portrait, Ward, dressed in a long dark suit coat and holding a craniometer and lion skull, looks professorial: the serious naturalist with stylishly tapered beard and mustache. Ward quit school at fourteen to work at his father's taxidermy firm, mounting bird illustrator John Gould's prized hummingbirds and other famous specimens. At twenty-two, realizing the potential of tabloid taxidermy, he struck out on his own. His first triumph was the McCarte lion, which killed its tamer in 1873. Ward posed it in wounded agony, causing a sensation that would launch his phenomenal career. Other effigy-like things followed. He turned the hooves of Holocaust, the champion racehorse, into inkwells, and rendered Cloister, another racehorse, into a regal trophy head (now at the National Horseracing Museum). London Jack, the dog that collected money for charity at Waterloo station, was, after his death, stuffed and outfitted with baskets to continue his benevolent duty. Lady Flora, the championship shorthorn cow, was a Ward mount, as was Brutus the circus lion; Farthest North, an Eskimo dog Robert E. Peary took on his foot expedition across Greenland; and, of course, the head of Persimmon, King Edward VII's championship racehorse. Business was booming, and England never had to say goodbye.

In spite of the fetishism, Ward was considered a naturalist. These were the days when taxidermy was taxidermy, no matter what one had stuffed. A member of the Zoological Society of London, Ward was granted the royal warrant "Naturalist, by appointment to his Majesty the King," which he used on his trade label to promote himself.

While Ward was establishing himself abroad, his firm was developing a prosperous sideline of animal furnishings. So imaginative was the firm that it is difficult to refrain from describing these accessories now. The firm turned crocodiles into umbrella stands, baby giraffes into high-back chairs (towering), and Siberian tigers into rugs. It made bowls out of lobsters, doorstops out of ostriches, garbage cans out of elephant feet, and inkstands out of rhino horns. Only at Ward's could a person buy "zoological lamps"—kerosene (later electric) lamps made out of eagles, owls, black swans, birds of paradise, and, on occasion, monkeys. Ward's elephant-foot liquor cabinets were especially popular with kings and rich hunters—rivaling even Rowland's brother Edwin's grizzly bear dumbwaiter (an upright grizzly holding a cocktail tray in its paws—an idea that Rowland would claim as his own). No one forged better great auks or dodos than Rowland Ward—or lied about them so convincingly. Surprisingly, the firm continued to turn rhinos and antelopes into ornamental bookends, lamps, and ashtrays up until the mid-1970s.

Ward died in 1912, but his studio thrived until the 1960s, when attitudes toward ecology shifted and orders such as the 365 tigers for His Highness the Maharajah of Cooch Behar dwindled, as did requests for "His" and "Her" elephant heads. When Kenya banned trophy hunting in 1976, the firm was doomed—and so was taxidermy.

By the time Astley arrived at Ward's, the firm—which once mounted lions by painstakingly removing and then implanting each whisker and eyelash individually, by hand—was sending out repair jobs with the glue still wet. Commercial taxidermy is never easy, but at Ward's it was becoming unbearable: low pay, long hours, sagging morale. "I got the sack for refusing to sweep the floor," Astley says, shaking his head. And so in 1983, Ward's shut down for good.

Today it's hard to find a former Ward's employee. Most of the people who worked for the firm are gone. They left no written records of their lives as taxidermists because, as Pat Morris suggests, they didn't think what they had to say about their profession was important. But here is Astley, and opportunity is opportunity, so I ask him to describe Ward's, and he's happy to oblige.

He lifts his head up from his pint, raises an eyebrow, nods, and begins to list several departments as if he's walking through them in his mind: elephant footstools, game heads, finishing work. Then he turns grave. I figure he's trying to retrieve the details; Ward's was, after all, England's most illustrious taxidermy firm. I glance down at my notebook to make sure I have plenty of blank pages. Then Astley starts to roll. He is bright-eyed and animated, a lively storyteller with a deadpan disposition. He speaks quickly, with increasing momentum. I'm not quite following what he's saying, but I write it all down anyhow, thinking it will make sense later, once I've had the chance to research Ward's myself back in the States. Astley launches into a long, discursive story about how the foreman of the big-head section threatened to murder him, as well as something he calls the passenger pigeon caper. (My notes are unintelligible and say only "fifty-pound ransom.") Astley talks and talks, and I scribble and scribble, hoping to uncover something substantial, until I realize that I've been writing for an hour or so about a deaf girl who worked near the Irish floor sweeper because she was immune to his drunken songs and who got too fat for the birdman and ended up dating the foreman of the big-head department, a liar and a petty thief, who soon left—as did Astley—for World of Nature.

As I walk back to my dorm room that night, I feel like a freshman who was just hazed. In the morning, someone pounding on my door jolts me out of a deep sleep. I climb out of bed, dizzy and disheveled, and crack open the door. It's the Chairbitch in her pajamas, a towel slung over her shoulder, heading for a shower with her colleagues. She tosses me my denim jacket (I forgot it at the bar), scrutinizes me, and growls, "Ugh! You look like something from out of a movie." Then she lets out a deep laugh that still haunts me today.

For all its frivolity, the guild show ends on a serious note: a lecture by Pat Morris, the leading authority on British taxidermy and, as it happens, a hedgehog expert.

Morris is tall, with thinning gray-blond hair. He looks stern, but he comes alive when he talks about taxidermy. He knows everything about the subject, and anyone who has ever seriously investigated the topic (doctoral students, curators, artists, historians, conservators) inevitably finds him, because his personal archive contains things that no one else in the world has—at least not all in one place. Sometimes he'll photocopy a deceased taxidermist's sketchbook for a library so that he won't have the only copy in existence. That doesn't mean he's exceptionally generous; he has a reputation as a shrewd barterer, using information as leverage to acquire mounts for his collection.

The guild is honored to have Morris as a member, and the other members sit in somber silence watching slides he has culled from his archive. What he shows us is essentially a history of neglect. For the first time in days, the guild members are silent—not a single wisecrack. Even Fishwick is quiet.

Mayer removes her sunglasses and watches as Morris shows mounts destroyed by natural causes (moths, beetles, sun); mounts ruined by accidents and fires; mounts dismantled because of "politically correct" museum policy; mounts bombed during World War II. He shows anthropomorphic foxes from the Great Exhibition of 1851, now sadly estranged from their historic context; distorted whales stored too close to hot boilers; and taxidermy collections quietly given away out of embarrassment, languishing in museum storerooms, or simply vanished. This is a taxidermy death knell.

It's also a fitting prelude to yet another loss, the auctioning off of Mr. Potter's Museum of Curiosities, an astounding collection of Victorian taxidermy. The auction is being held in two days, and the guild members are horrified to lose this "little bit of taxidermy history." No one is more aware of what the auction means than Morris. Victorian taxidermy is his area of expertise. In fact, he would have taught a course on the subject if interdisciplinary departments had been common early in his career, and if some of his colleagues didn't equate his passion for taxidermy with cruelty to animals. His love of taxidermy is actually an outgrowth of his deep appreciation for natural history, and he believes you cannot study the history of one without the other.

Morris has spent more than thirty years searching for old museum mounts. He asks how a museum could lose six upright polar bears or groups of fighting tigers. Where are these things? He's on the prowl for them. Sometimes he is bewildered by what he discovers. In the mid-1980s, for instance, he visited the Smithsonian Institution and found Hornaday's white setter on the scent of quail, called Coming to the Point, in the attic, on its side, dusty and forgotten. Unlike Hornaday's landmark baby elephant, at least it had surfaced, and Morris didn't have to wonder how a museum could misplace an elephant, of all things.

If given permission, Morris will go to extremes to authenticate a specimen. Once, in 1981, the dean of Westminster Abbey allowed him to x-ray the duchess of Richmond's three-hundred-year-old stuffed African grey parrot. He took the images in the crypt that contains the wax effigy of Lord Nelson, confirming that the parrot was indeed mounted using methods abandoned by the 1800s and therefore "one of the oldest surviving stuffed birds in existence."

Sometimes Morris's efforts are misunderstood, and he is called eccentric. However, not long after the guild show, the director of the Natural History Museum invited him to lunch, perhaps to placate him after the museum destroyed three Rowland Ward dioramas, works Morris considered the best they had in Britain.

And now he stands before Emily Mayer and the guild and says, "We're about to see another case of loss. On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week will be the auctioning off of Mr. Potter's Museum of Curiosities. The rumor is that quite a bit of this will go to America. This is a permanent loss to Britain, but so far no one has come forward to buy it because it's taxidermy."