“My baby’s got the
most deplorable taste/but her biggest mistake is hanging over the
fireplace/She’s got ducks, ducks on the wall!” That
song by the Kinks rankles: What’s the matter with ducks on
the wall? During my 15 years as a Wyomingite, I’ve learned
that ducks make especially nice ornaments, winging toward windows
or flapping past fireplaces.
It isn’t just ducks
that provide a graceful element of the outdoors inside. In our
home, a 28-pound chinook salmon yanked by my husband from Lake
Michigan describes a 36-inch crescent of iridescent fish-flesh
against the stone-walled fireplace. From the stairway of our
home’s front entrance, the head of a buck mule deer surveys
the quiet street through glass eyes. In our den where I curl up to
read with pillow and throw, a whitetail deer’s head looks out
a high horizontal window into the backyard. Even in our bedroom,
the mounted head of the pronghorn antelope that fed us through one
winter gazes down at us.
Our own duck on the wall, a hen
mallard, dangles from a hook in the guest room. Various other heads
and horns too numerous to catalog rest on shelves, prop up books,
or hold down piles of paper.
On a vacation to Wyoming
long before moving here from the Midwest, I stopped at a grocery
store whose walls were lined with a menagerie of head mounts. I was
taken aback by facing dead cousins of what I was about to purchase
from the meat counter. It was creepy, and like many people, I was
horrified by animal parts hanging from walls. I suppose my beliefs
about hunting and decorating have become more pragmatic over time:
Why just use just the interior part of the animal? Why not decorate
with it, too?
Our home has become part art gallery and
part natural history museum. I figure that if my husband is going
to hunt and bring home meat and fish, the least we can do to pay
respect to these creatures is to preserve representatives of them,
to admire them, to remember them, to appreciate their beauty and
even their superiority to us in so many ways.
But this is
mostly a Western tradition. When our Midwestern families come to
visit, they try not to make eye contact with our interior
décor. Instead, they try to tame our predilections and give us
animals exhibited in less shocking ways. For the last several
years, they have sent my husband at least one article of clothing
embroidered, screened, or embossed with the image of an animal
he’s hunted and taken to a taxidermist. In one recent
birthday gift box, cradled under crackly tissue-paper, a whitetail
deer strutted across the breast of a sweater. For Christmas, the
deer was joined by panoply of fish and game, including biting trout
and diving ducks.
For some reason, my husband’s
appreciation for animals doesn’t extend to wearing their
images on his clothing, so the various representatives of fish and
fowl usually wind up at the bottom of his dresser drawer. I
can’t blame people for surmising that someone who likes
critters on the wall would also like animal-wear on his clothes.
I’m guessing, but I think wearing an animal illustration on
his chest feels crassly like advertising: Bud Light; NASCAR; Nike;
mule deer; rainbow trout. But dressing like the outdoors is
practical under some circumstances, even if wearing animals like a
badge is not. Camouflage clothing disguises a hunter as a
combination of rock, branches, mud and sagebrush pulsed once
through a food processor. It’s apparently an effective choice
for stalking in the woods, and my husband owns a fair supply.
The catalogs from Orvis and other companies that sell
this clothing arrive in our mailbox with the regularity of
migrating geese. Their covers echo the designs they sell. Often the
company name and catalog date is hidden behind the thicket of
briars and brambles and tree trunks in olive green and acorn brown.
The other dominant color in this natural collage is bright orange.
As a non-hunter, l’m not sure when hunters are supposed to
blend in with the surroundings or when they’re supposed to
stand out in something so bright they shame the sun. I’m glad
my husband knows the difference: There’s a bare spot above
the dresser that could use a nice set of horns.
Julianne Couch is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). She is a writer in Laramie,
Wyoming.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
