“You’re welcome to stay,” said Lunde. “But I wouldn’t hold your breath. I don’t have a definite appointment with Tomás.”
“I know that.”
“Okay then. Coffee?”
Bob followed Lunde through the door behind the counter and into what was evidently a workshop. It was a large room with several workbenches, tools hanging on the walls. The smell, probably glue, reminded him of something from his childhood, recalling Christmas and candy, only a little more pungent. Lunde moved four yellowish-white figures that looked like they were carved in polystyrene so Bob could sit down. One resembled a deer, the others were smaller mammals, maybe lynxes or wolves.
“What are these?”
“We call them mannequins,” said Lunde as he poured coffee from a stained pot. “We order them and they come ready-cut like that.”
“But that’s cheating.”
Lunde laughed and handed Bob a mug with National Taxidermist Association written on it. “I still need to file them down a bit, where you can see the crosses I’ve made. But yes, the days when we used formalin and the soft parts of the animal are over. Now it’s just the hide and the horns. And the teeth, if the customer requests it.”
Lunde walked over to the head and neck of a deer mounted on a stand. The hide around the nose and eyeholes was dotted with what looked like needle pricks. He pressed a small ball of clay into one of the eyeholes, opened a drawer in a plastic box and took out two eyes.
“Plastic?”
“Glass. These are special order. I’m very particular about the eyes.Tooparticular, according to some of my suppliers.” Lunde pushed an eye into the clay. Studied it, turned it a little. “The harthas oblong pupils that have to be positioned horizontally,” he explained.
“Why?”
“So that they can take in the horizon in one look. They’re prey.”
“They’re on the lookout for predators?”
“Precisely.”
After he had inserted both eyes and added more clay around them and sculpted to shape, Lunde sat on one of the workbenches, picked up a hide and showed Bob a hole.
“Bullet hole.”
Working from the inside, he cut the hole a little larger before starting to sew it closed. Burned off the end of the thread with a lighter.
“It’s quiet here,” said Bob.
“Yes it is,” said Lunde. He walked over to the deer mannequin, applied glue to the clay surrounding the eyes and fit the hide over the head, pulling it forward over the head like a sweater.
“Right now it looks more like an ass,” he said as he lifted up the floppy ears. “But we’ll deal with that later.”
“How long does it take you to, er…make an animal?”
“That depends. Anything from a week to six months. A head like this is a lot less work than if you want the whole animal. A lot of the procedures take time. Flaying, salting, drying the skin. Then you have to find the right expression.”
He picked up a scalpel from the table and started cutting and shaping the white skin around the eyes. “This one, for example, I need to give a look of ease and power. A so-called alpha male.”
“Oh?”
“That’s the way the client recalled the animal when he shot it, so that’s what he’s ordered.”
“A hunter who wants to capture his moment of triumph over an animal that thought it was in control,” said Bob.
“Very poetic. And in this particular case, very accurate.”
“And you can do it? Give the animal this type of authentic expression?”
“Well,” said Lunde, “of course, I don’t know if it’s authentic. What does an animal feel? I just have to use my imagination and end up, I’m sure, giving it a more or less human look. The thing is, anyway, to see it through the client’s eye. To show what the client wants to see.”
