Yet Downing himself is not rich. He is not even that popular. This is because his work, he believes, is widely misunderstood.

Women in particular, though many men too, upon hearing his profession, enjoy regaling him with stories about the Sussex shop of the wealthy Mr. Walter Potter and his “Museum of Curiosities,” and Titus Downing of Leamington Spa has no time for people who think that he does what Walter Potter is doing.

Walter Potter—the very name casts a spoil upon the tongue!—Walter Potter, who anthropomorphizes any number of little beasts into obscene human tableaux: gerbils sipping tea, rabbits at cards, kittens wearing miniature wedding gowns, all of which the public adores?

Walter Potter is the reason why the public’s attention matters not to Titus Downing.

Downing’s method, if one can call it a method, is supplication. It’s prayer. For only by exercising total humility, he believes, can one fully invoke the desires of another. To understand how a creature moves, you have to know what a creature wants, and it is in this way that Downing is able to envision the skin he manipulates: to see the purpose of the mid-set jaw of the squirrel, to so accurately position the rolling harmp of the wolf’s haunch, the split-beak shock of the long-tailed tit—but it is in Big Game that Downing truly shines, and right now the man (so pale! so anemic-looking!) is hovering over the skin of a grand Bengal tiger in the warm, well-lit back room of his taxidermy shop.

There are no chairs. Downing’s workshop is no more than ten meters wide, ten meters long, just enough to house two battered pine workbenches. A lone, quiet window illuminates a trio of shelves holding rows of fat glass bottles filled with beeswax, with mixed cedar oils, with salt of tartar, with palm wine, and they are next to chalky plasters and earth-and-water clays, any number of arsenical soaps and limes, astringents and powders, and though Downing can no longer smell it, for it has leaked into his skin, into his clothes, into what chestnut down remains of his hair, surrounding everything is rosemary: the omnipotent pine-sweet of camphor.

At the end of one workbench, next to a flat whetstone, wrapped in a fold of polished cow leather and twine, are the taxidermist’s tools. For as the unskilled artisan surrounds himself with a great array of unnecessary items, those which he calls upon fruitlessly, the skilled artisan selects what he calls “the fine few,” and these, for Downing, are: 1. a classic, indispensable skinning knife, the blade’s cheek long, belly narrow, and bearing a handle made from a bright lignum vitae; 2. a broader model of the classic, indispensable skinning knife, with a larger belly, intended for heavier work; and 3. a saw-knife for the roughest work, the perforated blade with its wooden handle firmly attached to the plunge line with a polished brass ferrule.

Hanging from old nails on the wall are two dissecting scalpels procured from a London surgical instrument maker, two pairs of scissors (one to slice, one to prune), one pair of chunky bell hangers’ pliers, and a large cloth pouch holding the piercing awl, the slender brainspoon, a pair of cutting nippers used chiefly by watchmakers, a straight stuffing iron (for this, Downing employs a bartender’s old stirring spoon), and finally a hip-shaped pair of gentle tow forceps, when the work demands extraordinary prudence, and it is the tow forceps which Titus Downing grips now as he hovers over the skin of the grand Bengal tiger.