Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 26, 1995 TAG: 9511270012
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-22 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ADRIANNE BEE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
"On average, I check in 300 deer a year and eight to ten bear," said East, whose shop doubles as a game check-in station. A federal license also allows him to mount endangered species and other animals for museums.
East, who began preserving animals when he was 12, has already ordered the foam forms for the deer that will come DOA to his shop. A hunter can choose an aggressive or docile look for his deer, depending on the style of form, which shapes the animal and gives it musculature.
There isn't much underneath a mounted animal. Blackburn compared a deer head to a pocketbook. The meat is removed and the thin hide tanned, preserved with chemicals, disinfected, moth-proofed, dried and stretched and glued onto a form of the customer's choice.
"It's not gruesome," he said. "You're preserving stuff that's beautiful, and when people become aware of that, they decide they want something in their house."
A freeze-dried turkey head hangs from East's wall awaiting a body. He said the heads are sent away to be freeze-dried and come back in eight to ten weeks.
"These are all pieces of art," he said of the immobile snake, deer and bobcats in his shop. "I can't paint, so this is my art."
The humble taxidermist can paint: he does a mean largemouth bass, and you should see his striped bass (all mounted fish are air-brushed). Everything is painted just a bit - deer noses are blackened along with the area around their eyes.
If this is art, there are collectors - "repeat customers" - who have had 30 or 40 animals mounted. East shows a photo of one such customer's wall, cluttered with the heads and antlers of woodland creatures.
"I'm re-creating nature," he said. "It's just like somebody going out and spending two or three hundred dollars for a portrait to hang on their wall."
Fellow taxidermist Anthony Blackburn says meat is "just an excuse" trophy-hunters use, but at least a few good meals come out of Bambi before his head gets stuck on a piece of wood.
Why do others pay money to preserve dead animals and put them on their wall? Maybe they need a place to hang their gun. If you wish, a gun rack can be fashioned out of two of your deer's hooves beneath the standard mount.
Or is this just an ego thing?
"Oh, yeah," East said. "Before a hunter gets a big deer head, he's competing with himself. After that, he's competing with everybody else."
Blackburn prefers to call it "a challenge to yourself, asking yourself, `Can I outwit this animal?''' He points out that the white-tailed deer is "one of the most elusive animals to hunt in North America."
Dewayne Linkous, 35, a taxidermist on Hightop Road in Blacksburg, also deals with the deer that weren't quite elusive enough.
He agrees that ego is the main reason people walk through his doors. Male ego? Not necessarily. Linkous has mounted five state-record deer, including the 18-point buck Melissa Boone killed with a bow in Floyd County.
Not all kills are intentional. "We get a lot of road-kill," said Linkous, who turned his hobby into a full-time job in 1974 .
Linkous and his three full-time employees at Linkous Taxidermy say the hardest part of taxidermy is keeping the floors clean. No matter how clean the shop is, the staff has to use surgeon's gloves and take shots to combat the risk of rabies and Lyme disease.
Blackburn, East and Linkous all learned aspects of the craft from classes at Piedmont Community College in Roxboro, N.C., a place that draws hundreds of wannabe taxidermists every year.
Money and time required for each job varies among taxidermists. One says with a laugh that most taxidermists lie about turnaround time. But he says even the weather can affect how long it will taketo get your mounted game back. On sunny days, deer have a way of piling up in his shop. When it rains heavily, there is a lull.
Linkous says he can do six deer a day. He charges $185 to $385, depending on what his customer wants done. Bear rugs run $70 a foot; fish cost $4 an inch.
East does four or five bobcats and eight deer at a time. He charges $150 to $200 for deer.
Linkous said it's quality, not price, that should count.
"I take my time" said Blackburn. "My customer's going to be looking at their trophy for the rest of their life." His general price for a deer head is $200.
Is there anything these taxidermists won't stuff?
"I don't do pets," said East, because "they don't make forms for hamsters."
Blackburn recalls quite a few mount ideas he has turned down that he considered to be in "poor taste" - a deer with an arrow in its neck, for instance, and a machine-gun-toting groundhog with a Rambo-style bandana around its head. He was disappointed to find that a fox he had mounted for one customer ended up with a hole drilled in its mouth for a cigar and a John Deere cap atop its head.
"I don't do snakes," Linkous said with an exaggerated shiver. "I'm afraid of snakes."
by CNB