Big game's artists

Big game season is off to a promising start, if the work at Alpine Artistry is any indication.
“A week or two ago we were seeing mostly antelope,” said taxidermist Rodney Tobler, “Now we’re seeing deer and elk.”
There are enough animals being brought in, he said, to keep the crew of four busy full time.
Along with ungulates, the Alpine crew is busy prepping black bears.
“We got six this week,” taxidermist Josh West said. “Usually we get about four a week.”
The work is not as bloody as one would imagine, as the taxidermists work primarily with hides and heads. By the time the skins reach them, the edible meat has been removed. Still, there is a lot left to do before a mount is made.
First, the hides need to be scraped.
“The more flesh you remove, the better,” said West. To do so, he uses surgical scalpels, and cuts the flesh off the hide until you can see the roots of the hair. “The tannery shaves it even closer than we do,” he added.
The scalpels are so sharp, West said, you can’t feel them when they cut you. But, he added, “You always know you cut yourself when you get into the salt.”
After scraping, the hides are salted and hung, then resalted each day for two to three days until dry. Once thoroughly dry, “they get stiff, and we fold ‘em and ship ‘em,” he said. They are sent to a tannery, where they are processed and returned to the taxidermists to be constructed into life-sized replicas of the wild living things they once were.
But back to those scalpels. West said he uses an average of two blades per hide, sharpening every few slices “as long as they stay sharp, then you throw them away. They come in boxes of a hundred.”
Regular knives are not sharp enough for the rigorous, non-stop scraping, he said. And, after working in taxidermy for a number of years, he doesn’t cut himself much anymore.
“You get cut a lot when you first start,” the 23-year-old said, “then you learn.”
West began as a hobby taxidermist when he was 11, then worked in the profession in Idaho before joining the Alpine staff four years ago.
The animals this crew works on are the cream of the crop.
“They come in from all over the state,” said Tobler. The shop also serves “a few outfitters from Idaho,” and, Tobler added, “We do ten to fifteen African safaris a year.”
The safaris, he said, bring in many animals at once. “When those guys go out, they don’t just shoot one animal,” he said.
African skins come in pre-salted, Tobler said, and the method used afar differs from that of the shop. The result is many of the hides come in needing repair in the form of painting in missing fur, or creating horns for animals lacking them. One Cape buffalo in the workshop had streaks of white along his snout, the result of the foreign drying method, the taxidermist said.
Animals brought in by the safaris include antelope, leopard, Cape buffalo and other exotics that adorn the Alpine showroom until retrieved by their owners.
Visitors often come through and ask about purchasing the pieces, Tobler said, but they’re out of luck.
“All the stuff that’s here belongs to clients,” Tobler said, with the exception of a few pieces belonging to the workers and the store’s owner.
Sometimes a hunter wants just a skull and horn set, and that’s when the shop’s beetles take over.
The taxidermy shop utilizes flesh-eating beetles that need to be kept in a room between 80 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit. After the men remove most of the meat off a skull, the beetles are allowed to eat off the remaining scraps, as they can get into every nook and crevasse where the men’s knives cannot.
After three days, the skulls are boiled, then painted with a thick paste of concentrated peroxide. The painted skulls sit for a couple more days, said Jake Peterson, another taxidermist at the shop. Then they are boiled again, then re-bleached until the bone is sparkling white.
The horns are cleaned and oiled, added Tobler, to bring out their color and texture.
They’re beautiful once finished, a contrast of rich brown antlers and bright white bone, unlike the summer-bleached horns found while hiking.
For full sized mounts or shoulder mounts, the processed skins are stretched over foam bodies that look like luminous imitations of the musculature of the various beasts. Owner Shawn Andres adds glass eyes, and makes the forms more realistic by sculpting details with clay.
The hides are stretched over the forms, and secured HOW???? by the men.
To enhance the realistic appearance, the shop stages the animals on bases cast from actual stone. Making the molds for a base takes two weeks alone. The molds are filled with liquid foam that hardens light and strong.
Afterwards, the foam rock is painted realistically, with the look of lichen, shadows and dirt appearing via the paint job.
Once the game is placed on its mount, it is a frozen movement, a second of time captured in a 3-D format.
The mounts are museum quality, and many of the specimens are big and bold, trophy quality.
All the men are hunters, and their work in taxidermy has only one drawback, said West.
“You get to see all this big stuff come in, and you don’t see it out in the woods.”