wipe off the blood marks.

wipe off the blood marks. Then you bring it home and put it in your freezer in a plastic bag,” he said, laughing at the squeamish response to the idea of a dead animal lying on top of the frozen broccoli and hamburger. “It will keep up to six months so there’s no hurry to get it to a taxidermist."

While the raw material is stored conveniently in the freezer, Rick checks through stacks of catalogs for the eyes he must order. Styrofoam bodies are also available but Talley generally chooses to make his own body forms from woodswool. "It's much cheaper. Woodswool is like wood shavings. You squeeze it all together and shape it kind of like modeling clay," he explained. . , *Tta«n comes the hard pa*V at least for folks ‘vvftb Ti'av? * difficulty in cutting “tfp“ a * store-bought whole chicken. Rick makes an incision up the center of the animal from its tail to the tip of its nose. Out come the insides and in goes calorax, a white powder preservative that must be sprinkled over all surfaces.

“Next, I cut off the back of the skull and take out the brain,” Rick continued, grinning again at the involuntary shivers his discription produced in his listeners. “I fill in the brain and the eyes with clay and pull the skin back over.”

With a wire pushed through the center of the body mold, Rick guides it into the skin. For a squirrel, a wire goes into each leg right through the bottom of the foot.

Instead of using a mold to simulate muscles, pick wraps string around leg bones which have been stripped of flesh and treated with calorax. First the front legs and then the back are slipped into the skin and connected to the body mold.

A wire goes through the squirrel’s tail and also connects to the mold. With everything in place, out comes the needle and thread to sew the skin back up.