I Am Me

I hadn’t touched my cutting blade in the six years since I had given up the art. I say “art,” though many would cringe at my using that word. Taxidermy is considered a dirty, crude trade. But as someone who was once immersed mind, body and soul into the practice of preservation, I cannot imagine a more rewarding experience. When a specimen is successfully mounted, the taxidermist feels a sense of Godliness, of having defied death and attained immortality. Finished specimens are more than models; they are fractions of life, preserved in three-dimensional forms.

“You’ve improved dramatically,” I told him, ushering forward the best compliment I could manage, considering the torrent of bitterness raging within me.

“I had a good teacher,” he said, humbly.

But I shook my head. “You surpassed anything I ever achieved… I always thought I had the unique gift of capturing an animal’s character in its recreation, but you took it further.” The elephant’s eyes met mine. “You’ve captured its very soul.”

The word struck me with deeper significance as I said it: soul. That’s precisely what I was seeing before me. Menon had captured every creature’s soul and projected it through its recreated form. It is said that when a creature dies, the soul escapes blameless, while the body is left behind to hold all of its sins. These specimens in Menon’s store were brimming with evil, with horrific misdeeds and sinful pasts, but their souls were intact, too. Trapped within their murderous forms, these souls were in turmoil, demanding to be freed.

“Have you worked on any pieces since retirement?” he asked, as we left the cheetah and came up to two lionesses, nuzzling each other affectionately.

“No,” I said, though I wondered if perhaps he had guessed it already.

“The field is changing daily,” he said, conversationally. “The methods have advanced, but the attitude had regressed to a more romantic, old-fashioned time.”

“How so?”

“We aren’t merely content with capturing an animal’s form. We want to take a living being, with all its imperfections, its malice, its greed, its cruelty… and immortalise it.”

A lonely orang-utan caught my eye, like evidence to his statement.

I remembered an orang-utan I had restored several years ago. It had been laborious work, because like all primates, the orang-utan has a unique face that is more difficult to capture in a mould than other animals. I had struggled with the plaster for weeks, and it had been Menon who had finally solved the problem. He had had the foresight of making a “death mask” of the orang-utan when its body had first arrived in our class, and using that as a reference, he designed the clay mould, and practically finished the piece all by himself. I had been proud of him then. I wondered why that pride had evaporated with time, to be replaced by jealousy.

“In the years after I left your class,” he continued, “I travelled whenever I could afford it, collecting artefacts along the way. I learned to hunt, to earn the trophy and not merely build it. Perhaps that was what my earlier pieces were lacking. It’s one thing to have an animal sent to you to be mounted, but to actually kill it yourself… nothing comes close to that experience.”

I listened enviously, imagining what a kill would feel like. I had been raised with the belief that murder was a sin, a crime so heinous that it damaged your soul. But there was something tempting about the idea of taking a life, before “immortalising” it.

I stood near a beautiful zebra, with wise, thoughtful eyes, and a near-smile on its peaceful face. Though the notion of “stuffed” animals following an observer with its eyes is somewhat of a cliché, it always humbled me to realise just how much feeling lurked within those glass eyes. The zebra seemed to regard me with empathy—no, with something more than that… with recognition. He looked at me as though I were a friend—a long lost friend, perhaps, but a friend nonetheless. I gazed into those empty eyes and found a Universe within.