You slam the doors, climb into the driver’s seat and turn on the A/C and Soulja Boy, full blast. You hit the garage door button and the machine hums as the door rises.

The garage floods with sunlight.

You pull out onto the street, checking your phone. Though it is just 8:52 a.m., you now have 233 text messages and 97 emails, but this is, again, standard. You locate Greg Tampico’s address on King Street in Alexandria, stab the GPS button, and are able to relax for the first time today as the Tahoe, worth every penny, knows what to do.

* * *

Any piece of taxidermy begins with the mount, and for the aardvark, Titus Downing has chosen a thick piece of Leadwood the color of raisins, and it’s a block of heavy wood which he has special-ordered from Namibia, and it took several weeks to get here, and it’s finally here. The taxidermist spends whole days sawing and sanding the mount, which he then polishes, glossing it up with several coats of shellac, and when it is dry, he selects two iron rods: one straight, to stand upright and center, the other a convex curve to screw on top of the first, to support the aardvark’s spine, neck to tail.

Together, the two rods look like a melting T, and when both are secured, the mount is now ready for what’s called “the mannequin.”

Downing builds every skin that arrives in his shop its very own mannequin, and the mannequin, made solely of wire and water clay, is a sloppy process demanding of its maker a great deal of patience and care. Downing measures the skin with the patience of a parent to decide how much clay will be required and today learns that the full length of the aardvark, at least this particular aardvark, tail to snout, over the hump, is an astonishing two-point-two meters, and the girth, the full circumference of belly and back, is an astonishing one-point-one meters, and Downing wonders if the aardvark wasn’t more than just a bit on the fat side, which means that she was a good hunter. Which means that part of her jiva must be her alertness, her good hearing, and as he strokes the aardvark’s silky ears, he studies the sketches provided by Ostlet to figure out whether the ears should stick up or hang down.

Ostlet’s assistant has drawn them down.

Downing well knows that sketches alone cannot be trusted, that beasts before stuffing are often drawn after death, and, based on what he knows of the ears of Common Mammals, deduces from his Darwin that the long ears must serve a purpose, they must stick up to hear better, so after Downing builds the mannequin upon which the skin of the aardvark, padded with the finest wool from his father’s farm in Northumberland, will hang, he affixes two wiry spires moving out from the base of the neck, and is ready.

Downing carefully lifts the aardvark’s spine, drooping it over the curved rod of the mount. How the shoulder blades of the forearms do fan into paddles, he marvels, before they swoop back, dropping to the elbows, which reach amazingly under the rib cage before shooting straight down to the peroneus longus, the metatarsi, phalanges.