With hunting season comes trophy season (and memories)
Iowa’s hunting seasons are picking up, and watching pheasants scurry between rows of corn ahead of the combine reminds me of my childhood back in South Dakota.
Thanks to my father’s marksmanship, there was a constant flow of game birds and fish being disemboweled in the garage – providing pheasants for Sunday dinner and walleye for the standard menu on Fridays. But our human-wildlife interactions took a decided turn toward the macabre when one of my brothers enrolled in the Northwestern School of Taxidermy, a correspondence school founded “for nature lovers and sportsmen” by J. W. Elwood, a former Iowa teacher.
Responding to a “Special Offer for Boys” advertised in Outdoor Life magazine, Jimmy promptly received a personalized welcome letter from Professor Elwood himself proclaiming “I am mighty glad to count you as one of my students.” Our lives would never be the same.
In the interest of public health, my mother drew a firm line prohibiting taxidermy from the family kitchen. Thus, Jimmy set up shop on an old porcelain-topped table in the bedroom he shared with my youngest brother, Danny. Imagine being a five-year old and waking up in the night to find a Canadian goose with a six-foot wingspan soaring over your bed. (Amazingly, Dan seems quite normal today.)
Professor Elwood encouraged every young taxidermist to make a “real collection” and once the various scalpels, scrapers, glass eyes, and other necessities arrived, Jimmy’s productivity was impressive. The first lesson, “Preserving and Mounting Birds,” soon resulted in a pheasant in relatively realistic flight on the wall in the TV room. Next was a perky greenhead mallard with orange feet ensconced on the bookcase in the front porch. Then came the aforementioned Canadian goose and a variety of other feathered fowl.
Jimmy moved on to mammals about the same time he started running a trap line in a slough on the edge of town – trapping muskrats, mink, racoons, and other furbearing critters. I must admit I started to get a little queasy when he got into “Taxidermy Craft-work,” Lesson Five. I can appreciate the utility of making something useful from dead animals - but two squirrels pushing books together seemed tacky, even in South Dakota.
He lost me for good the day I encountered a dozen dead rattlesnakes hanging out to dry on the clothesline. I ran screaming back into the house to learn Jimmy had started Lesson Six: “Mounting Snakes and Other Reptiles.” He had acquired the snakes from the South Dakota Department of Agriculture, which had a rattlesnake eradication program at the time. (I can still see the rattles dangling from the ends of their tails.)
Eventually my brother’s interest in taxidermy was replaced by other pursuits and the mounted trophies, some of which had developed a suspicious odor, gradually disappeared. The Northwestern School of Taxidermy closed in the 1980s and the “pleasures and profits” of taxidermy, promoted so enthusiastically by Professor Elwood, faded into family history.
But I’ve hung a winsome faux deer head with gold antlers in the cabin at our farm and, if a pheasant in flight becomes a necessary addition, I know just the guy in Columbus Junction who can handle the job.
Susan Koch lives in Iowa City. She and her husband farm and raise purebred Angus cattle in Muscatine County.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Hunting season also means trophy season, and old memories
