Mounting enthusiasm.

Byline: Mark Baker The Register-Guard

SPRINGFIELD - It begins with the sickening stench of death and ends as a piece of art.

Mark Wisely uses both his latex-gloved hands to grab the massive, severed head of what was a half-ton Rocky Mountain elk off the bloody floor by its 4-foot-long horns and hoist it with all his might upon a nearby table.

Thump!

It is the sound of raw meat hitting linoleum. A gooey, squishy man-am-I-glad-I-didn't-have-a-big-breakfast sound.

"When I think this hide room's smelling good, people don't always agree with me," says the 36-year-old Wisely, who bought Adams Taxidermy on the old Franklin Boulevard, just east of Interstate 5, in 1995. Try it in the summertime. "It's pretty tough," says the Cottage Grove single father of three boys.

Yes, you do get used to the smell. Besides, what drew Wisely to this most unusual of businesses was his passion for hunting.

"Another one is the artwork aspect," he says, skinning the elk head with a pocket knife. "I guess that's truly what I'm in it for."

It's the height of the season for taxidermists as hunters continue to bring in their fall game for mounting. Turnaround time at Adams Taxidermy, begun in 1942 by the late Art Adams, is about 10 to 12 months, Wisely says. The process could actually be done for a deer or elk in about three weeks, but not when you're doing 400 to 600 invoices a year, he says.

"It's just sheer volume," says Wisely, who does mostly deer, elk and black bear mounts, but also everything from cougars, bobcats, foxes, wolverines, badgers or even the occasional zebra or wildebeest from an African safari kill.

"You name it," says Wisely, who has intense grayish-green eyes. "I think I've mounted an animal from every continent in the world except Antarctica.

"Never done a skunk, though" he says. "Don't really want to."

Among the unusual requests have been a domestic cat, Wisely says, cringing at the memory. The owner just wanted the tanned hide back for burial, he says.

Then there was the time an elderly woman, who Wisely estimates must have been nearly 100, had skinned her Dalmatian herself after it died and wanted it mounted. He refused; just sent her on her way, wished her luck and has since referred to her as "Cruella."

The hide room

The word taxidermy comes from two ancient Greek words: "taxis," meaning movement, and "derma," meaning skin.

It is not stuffing an animal's skin, not modern taxidermy, anyway, but stretching it around a mannikin made of Styrofoam and wood. Still, this is not a process for those with a weak stomach.

After hides are removed from animals, they are salted in the hide room to remove moisture before they are shipped to a tannery. Antlers are removed from the head with a chain saw.

The skinned heads are then boiled in the "horn pot" to clean the skulls and prepare them to be bleached with hydrogen peroxide.

Once skins come back from the tannery, they are bagged and refrigerated until ready for mounting. Glass eyeballs and ears are added during this process and the hide, now called a "cape," is glued onto the mount where it dries for seven to 10 days. The cape is then cleaned, brushed and groomed before paint and epoxy are added later, after the cape is sewn around the mount.

On a recent Thursday morning, apprentice Mark Willhite sews up the back of an elk mount. "You gotta kind of work the hide around where it fits," he says. Several sets of antlers hang on a rack above. Two black bear mounts sit on table. Another man, Fred Oliver, also works with Wisely, the two doing most all of the skinning work in the hide room.

'Best job in the world'

An industrial products salesman until his mid-20s, Wisely bought the business from Ken and Steve Erickson, the father-and-son team who bought it from Adams years ago. They stayed on for about nine months, Wisely says, as he learned his new trade and taught him all they knew.

"I wasn't artistic at all," he says. "I couldn't draw a stick deer."

A high school dropout from North Bend, Wisely learned how to hunt from his father, the late Ernest Wisely, a North Bend dentist. He has since passed his passion onto his boys, Johnathan, 16, Kurt, 14, and Nick, 11. Johnathan and Kurt shot their first bucks this season, Wisely says. And Johnathan has already learned how to do some taxidermy, having mounted a black Hawaiian sheep he shot on an exotic game ranch here in Oregon when he was 10.

Standard deer mounts at Adams Taxidermy go for $550, and elk mounts for $850. Wisely once did a full grizzly bear. That cost $3,600, he says.

But why do hunters do it?

"A lot of it's for prestige," he says. "But it's also for the memories."

The shop is filled with memories of past impressive game kills that came long before Wisely owned the place, some before he was even born. A 9-foot polar bear sits in a back corner, mouth open, ready to attack. It's been here for about 40 years, Wisely says. The story goes that the son of whoever it belonged to brought it in after his father died. There's also a lion here, paws outstretched, mouth also wide-open, on the attack. It supposedly came years ago from the Oregon Zoo in Portland, Wisely says.

There's a bighorn sheep, a massive moose shoulder mount with a $2,200 price tag on it, a 17-foot python skin stretched high above the room, lots of deer-head mounts, wild turkeys, bears, cow skulls and boxes of skins.

"This is the best job in the world," Wisely says. "But don't print that. I don't want everybody else doing it."