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But such memory making and oral history does not require an ostentatious mount. The rafters of my dad's garage are filled with antlers attached only to bits of skull from animals he's killed over his nearly 60 years of hunting. On many occasions, we've found ourselves together in there and he'll point to a set and tell me when and where he got them, what happened during the hunt. I remember bringing home for Christmas one year a girlfriend who had co-owned a hip gallery in San Francisco—not far from Paxton Gate , the upscale novelty boutique in the Mission District that specializes in clever taxidermy. She loved the antlers in the garage, and she and my dad had a good general rapport, but as they began to talk about them it seemed as though two beings—from different planets that were similar but distinct in important ways—were trying in vain to communicate. They both valued the antlers, but in ways that were alien to one another.The most impressive taxidermy in Art of the Hunt is a full-body mount by Dawayne Dewey of a tremendously large bighorn sheep ram sitting regally among rocks and brush that are meant to resemble his natural habitat. He has been literally put up on a pedestal, like an object of worship. This and other ultra-lifelike taxidermy seems to express to me a longing on the hunter's part to place the animal back into the wilderness, back into life—a longing that can never supersede or revoke his initial desire to kill it.
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