Back at the motel, where meat we haven’t killed is being prepared for our dinner, I pick up a copy of a local Sunday paper - the Billings Gazette. The ghost of Ernest flutters out of its pages. Inside the paper is a long feature on Dr Louis Allard, one of Billings’ greatest medical men, and the doctor who operated on Hemingway’s broken arm sixty-eight years ago, after the accident that brought Archie MacLeish out to Montana to see him. There is Ernest, arm in plaster and a big bandage around him, looking bashful and, as he tended to do when injured, a little pleased with himself.
Later, as I’m about to settle down to sleep, I hear a sound which conveys better than anything in nature the sense of these wide, wild spaces. It’s the long, low wail of a passing freight train. As the mournful sound dies away, I pick up a collection of stories about Montana. It’s called The Last Best Place.
Like the hunters up at Big Sky, Hemingway had an odd respect for the animals whose lives he brought to an end with such regularity.
The more favoured of his victims ended up sharing his house with him. The walls of the Finca Vigia in Havana bristle with all manner of proud beasts. Buffalo, oryx and kudu in the bedroom, Grant’s gazelle in the living-room, pronghorn in the dining-room, hartebeest in the hallway. In the library a leopard stares glassily up from the floor, snarl frozen on its handsome jaws, in the guest room two lion skulls occupy the shelf above Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, a writing desk in the tower room rests firmly on a flattened lion. Hemingway, by nature a reluctant spender, must have made an exception for taxidermists.
Stuffed heads and mounted skins seem to belong to the past, and I’m wondering if the modern hunter has the same inclination to hang his catches up on the wall. There is a taxidermist in a quiet suburb of Bozeman who I hope will be able to supply a few answers.
He lives and works from a house in a respectable development of modern, prairie-style houses called Outlaw Drive, which is off a road of equally respectable houses known as Wild Bunch Drive. To confuse matters even more, the suburb is called Belgrade.
There is no neon sign advertising Jerome Andres’ business, and the casual visitor strolling down Outlaw Drive might easily be confused by what is going on at No. 2950. A deer lies dead on the front lawn, a skinned corpse hangs in the open garage, swinging gently above a sea of antlers, and a mighty half-mounted bison head guards the door of one of the outbuildings.
As I walk up the short driveway I pass scatterings of horn and skin, a circular saw and a large plastic bin of jawbones marked ‘Inedible’.
Jerome Andres, the owner and proprietor, comes out to meet me, or to be more accurate I bump into him as he emerges carrying a moose-head from the workshop to the garage. He pulls the garage door a little wider and I can see quite grisly scenes of carnage in there.
He deposits his load in businesslike fashion and reappears. He’s a short, powerfully built man in jeans and a neat blue check shirt with long, greying sideburns protruding from a baseball cap, which he raises every now and then to wipe his brow, revealing a balding pate. He hitches up his trousers, smiles a little shyly and motions me to the door from which he first emerged. I feel faint unease and am glad that the sun’s shining and I’m not alone. In fact the door leads to a quite tasteful reception area. It is full of animals, but, unlike those in the garage, most of them are in one piece. There are a couple of heads in plastic bags nestling by the computer, but the room is a Noah’s Ark-like showpiece for taxidermy. A sign above the reception desk defines his business philosophy: ‘The Bitterness of Poor Quality remains long after the Sweetness of Low Price is Forgotten.’
The phone goes, Jerome deals with it quickly and sympathetically and as he replaces the receiver jots a name down on a pad.
‘They’re bringing a mountain goat in at noon.’
Jerome, or Jerry as he asks us to call him, is clearly a busy man. He was himself a hunter who learned taxidermy at eighteen and has taught it all over the States.
He takes us through in to the workshop. The smell is bad, a mixture of the sickly sweetness of flesh and blood and the pungency of epoxy resin and spray paint. He’s currently working on a moose-head. In this confined space it looks enormous, like a small meteorite. He apologises for having to keep working as he talks and begins to brush the horns before spray-painting the nose and around the eyes with the care and delicacy of a make-up artist.
He takes pride in this part of the process and says, without apparent irony, ‘Sometimes we make the animals better than they were before.’
In another room off the back of the workshop is the rest of Jerry’s workforce. One man is carefully removing fur from a goat’s legs, another is making a pair of eyes to fit an antelope skin stretched tight on a polystyrene mould.
‘These will eventually pop out through the head,’ he explains, helpfully.
A young woman with tumbling curly hair sits and paints another mould, another plaits what looks like bison beard. A radio plays quietly. The atmosphere is serene and studious. They could be embroidering a tapestry or illuminating manuscripts. Only the lingering fetid smell and a containerful of skinned heads gives it away.
Jerry is constantly being interrupted. Two men have just pulled into his driveway and are unloading a two-year-old pronghorn antelope. They’re very sure how they want it mounted. Body sideways on, in relief, with the head turned as if it’s looking out into the room.
Could Jerry do it by February? One of the men wants to give it as a present to his wife on Valentine’s Day.
Jerry sizes it up, makes a measurement or two and there and then, right on the front lawn, produces a short, sharp knife and begins to remove the skin from the body. He asks one of the men to hold it down with his foot whilst, with a quick and expert twist, he breaks the head off. As he pulls it away the skin follows neatly, like a coat being slipped from a pair of shoulders.
He carries the flayed carcass to the dreaded garage. He’ll clean the skin up tonight, remove all the flesh, turn the ears inside out, the lips will be split, salted and dried and then the skin will be sent to the local tannery.
‘Will you have it stuffed by February?’ I ask.
Jerry looks pained at the use of the ‘s’ word.
‘Stuffing is when you stuff something in a bag,’ he says a trifle tartly. ‘This is artistic improvement.’
‘Will it be artistically improved by February?’
‘Not a chance.’
The customer will have to wait over a year for his funny Valentine. Jerry has two hundred animals awaiting treatment, an African shipment is expected, there’s a water-buffalo in his workshop and the elk season started yesterday. The taxidermy business has clearly survived Hemingway’s death.
What I should like to do now is to gauge the health of another business that was once close to Hemingway’s heart. His doorway to the West, the dude ranch. The L-Bar-T no longer takes guests but plenty of others do, and the brochures compete fiercely in offering temptations for jaded city folk.
My favourite selling claim is the ranch that boasts, ‘Our view is out of sight!’
That should be worth not seeing.
Kalispell, Montana, is 275 miles, as the eagle flies, to the north-west of Bozeman, just to the far side of the Flathead Mountains, where the Rockies spread towards the Canadian border.
I’m waiting at the airport for my transport to a dude ranch at Marion, fifty miles to the west, and wondering if living in these great open spaces doesn’t do something to the mind, when I hear the sound of a cow drawing up at the Arrivals area. For those who might not have heard a cow drawing up at an Arrivals area, I can only describe it as a long, defiant moo, ending on a strangely falsetto note. This may be because it doesn’t in fact emanate from a cow, but from a long black Lincoln limousine with a pair of horns on the front which is heading straight for me. I try to appear unconcerned, but the limousine moos again, more confidently this time, as if the damn thing has recognised me. And it has. A window slides down and a wide-brimmed black hat appears, and beneath it a woman’s head which enquires politely if I’m Michael Palin.