I stared at the enormous, lone gray wolf for minutes - until the cigarette smoke in the Hotel Nevada Bar sent me scurrying out the door in search of fresh air.
Nowadays, I don’t think twice about a deer or elk head hanging on a bar, diner, or living room wall, but not that long ago, taxidermy was foreign to me.
The suburban Indianapolis restaurants and stores I frequented in my youth didn’t display animal heads. Actually, I didn’t see my first mounts until I moved to Montana in my early 20’s. And then, of course, they were everywhere.
Many city dwellers often say “yuck” to the idea of a giant moose head peering down over their breakfast table, but I love to get nose to nose with all types of animal mounts, studying the unusual shapes of their heads, their horns or antlers, their faces, their hooves or claws, their fins and scales, even. I still can’t readily tell a “trophy” from an “average joe” - they’re all impressive to me. I just like to look at them, plain and simple.
Since I’d never been a hunter, I rarely got a chance to view animals like deer, elk, antelope, moose, mountain goats, and caribou up close. And neither had Kirby, the giant German Shepherd/Catahoula mutt I owned when I first moved to Montana.
Animal mounts weren’t just new to me; it took my dog several days to learn to live in a home where he was constantly being watched.
Kirby was a fierce hunter, consistently killing raccoons without a scratch to himself, but he knew when he was outnumbered. When Kirby and I moved into Terry Adkins’ basement apartment in Sand Coulee at the start of my dog mushing career, my brave dog was in for a rude surprise. At the time, the apartment was a display room for dozens of amazing mounts from Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep to bears to an Alaskan wolf.
My fearless protector spent that entire first night obsessed with the creatures surrounding him; his scruff stood on end for hours as he paced the room, stopping every few minutes to growl and show his choppers to the snarling wolf or bear glaring down at him. I felt for the poor, confused dog, but there was no consoling him.
Kirby isn’t the only one I know who was misled by some very realistic animal mounts. When Shelly, my childhood friend from Indianapolis, joined me on a road trip up the Alcan Highway to the start of the Iditarod Sled Dog Race, she was amazed by the collection of mounts found in almost every gas station, diner, and hotel from Great Falls to Anchorage. Many of the animals she’d never even seen in the wild - paddle fish, elk, moose, bear, cougars. She stopped and studied the unusual creatures at every opportunity.
Finally, after a few days of continuous driving, we took a lunch break at Bob’s Diner in Beaver Creek, Yukon Territory, close to the border of Canada and Alaska. We were all red-eyed and groggy as we sat at the table nursing cups of coffee and soup. My friend stared at the mounts on the wall.
“It’s amazing,” Shelly said. “I’ve never seen one of those before.”
“One of what?” I asked her.
She pointed to what looked like a hairy owl hanging on the wall.
“Owls that live in the Yukon need lots of hair,” I told her. She nodded and continued to stare.
I don’t know if she was just unusually gullible or just exhausted at the time, but she believed me. The mount was a perfect example of crypto-taxidermy; somehow the artist had figured out a way to turn the rear end of some hairy, hoofed animal into an owl. Pure genius.
Shelly will never live that one down.
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