We notice them more at Christmas. Those old big game mounts on the walls of restaurants and in store lobbies decorated with blinking red noses.

Looking around an Elk's Lodge, walls lined with old bulls, I think those old game heads appear as though they were all in the military and someone had shouted the command to assemble and come to attention during a bar fight. And that is how they are frozen in time, bolt upright, staring straight ahead, swollen, bruised, perhaps with ears torn half off or cauliflowered, hair mussed or pulled out, lips pulled tight, noses crooked. Since that's not how elk look alive, I've always wanted a hoof pulled up over an eye in salute in at least one of the animals so the military bar-fight caricature was complete.

For people who know wildlife, most old taxidermy is representative at best, like a fifth-grader's drawing, but in fur and feathers.

Happily, this is changing as more and more taxidermists have taken lessons from the great artisan taxidermists of the last century who did the great animal dioramas in the different Museums of Natural History around the world. Today's taxidermists are mixing that flair for mounting fish and game in natural-looking poses and settings with an attention to detail never seen before in this ancient profession.

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