Sunday, December 07, 2003

	Bill Miller works on one of the bucks that came into his taxidermy shop during the busy opening week of deer season. In the background, Steve Lewis prepares another buck for mounting. Click photo for larger image.

This is the time of year when a million licensed hunters go out into Pennsylvania's woods and fields in hopes of bagging trophy deer. Bill Miller sits in his basement and lets the trophies come to him.

He's a taxidermist.

And this is the time of year his shop really gets stuffed.

"The opening day of deer season, I have to be here," Miller is saying in the don't-hit-your-head-low work room beneath his home in the coal-patch town of Blythedale. It's in Elizabeth Township, where Allegheny County's southeastern border is doodled by the Youghiogheny River.

Miller's Taxidermy has no sign. But you can follow the trail of blood on the sidewalk and steps that lead down to the short side door.

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On Monday, the first day of gun season, a hunter brought Miller his first buck head -- a handsome 11-point -- before noon. Miller worked until almost midnight, by which time he had five. Tuesday, they kept coming. Before the season ends next weekend, he expects to get 75 deer heads to skin and tan and mount so the hunters can display them on their walls.

While taxidermists typically take as long as a year to get deer back to their owners, Miller prides himself on turning them around in three to six months or faster, in part because he does his own tanning.

The phone rings again and he swears softly before answering and giving directions to another hunter.

"People can call me at 11 or 12 at night," Miller, 38, says with a grin. He used to work as an Airborne Express courier. But the lifelong sportsman longed to try taxidermy. About four years ago, after getting his wife Nora's blessing, he took the plunge, starting by assisting another taxidermist who "took me under his wing."

Miller won the Best All Around Amateur trophy at the 2001 Pennsylvania Taxidermy Association championships. The next year, he went pro. Now, his house is full of ribbons and awards. He's one of 466 members of this PTA, and this is his full-time job. Some 20 of his most creative mounts -- such as the habitat scene of a lynx attacking a snowshoe hare -- are displayed at the Gander Mountain outdoors store in West Mifflin. Until he moves and build his dream showroom, he doesn't have room.

One of the worn kitchen tables there was completely covered by a black bear, a 350-pound trophy of that recently ended season. Miller's employee, Steve Lewis, was skinning it Tuesday while listening to rock music on a small radio that had to compete with the whirring furnace. Deer heads and attached "capes" of neck hide rested on the floor, on a beach of salt the guys had spread out for drying pelts. A dozen racks of antlers from bucks taken during the recent archery season hung from a clothesline.

Various other creatures, fish to fowl, are scattered around the room, along with parts such as turkey beards and pelts, including the white one of an albino coyote.

"I'm looking forward to mounting that," Miller says. "It's really, really rare." But the "backbone" of his business is deer.

He'll tell you taxidermy is an art, and you can see that right from the start in the deft strokes he and Lewis make with their scalpels as they painstakingly cut the skin from the skulls.

After the processes of drying and pickling and tanning, it takes Miller about 18 hours to mount a puppet-like hide on a foam form and transform it back into a three-dimensional bust, detailed down to the chin whiskers and the artificial eyes he airbrushes with four different colors of paint.

He charges $385 for these shoulder mounts, and hunters pick their poses: "Straight," "left turn," "right turn." Particularly popular is "semi sneak," where the deer looks a little wary, as though it senses danger.

"I don't make a lot of money doing taxidermy work," Miller says. But, "It's such a bonus for me to get to work with animals. I can honestly say I enjoy my job."

Another of the rewards is when customers look at one of his mounts and "tell me how nice it looks. It looks alive."

Bob Batz Jr. can be reached at bbatz@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1930.

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