(Photo by Oscar Sanchez)

It’s never a good sign when the circus that’s only been in town for a few days calls the local taxidermist. Most days, Mariana  was called to worked on small animals, usually family pets or a raccoon that someone had shot in their back field. Hunting season usually brought a fair few larger animals or at least their heads that the trophy hunters wanted to display. The biggest, most exotic thing she’d ever worked on was a polar bear. She’d needed to rent out space in a local butchers freezer to store it while she got prepped for that job. Her own walk-in freezer was pretty big but polar bears were massive.

As Mariana walked through the circus, it was currently in the process of packing up, she kept looking around for any signs of the small, half trailer she’d been instructed to go to. The trouble was, most of the circus around her seemed to be made up of nothing but short, half trailers. From living spaces to storage units, she was surrounded by dozens of rectangular, metal boxes.

“Hey, lady,” someone called out and Mariana turned to find a tall, lanky man walking over to her, a look of concern on his face. “You looking for someone?”

He scratched at his stubbly chin and didn’t display too much hostility although he clearly didn’t think she ought to be there.

“Yes,” Mariana said quickly, “I was called about some animals that need to be taxidermized.”

The man furrowed his brow.

“You want to stuff our animals?” he asked with a tad more animosity.

“Someone with the circus called me about that,” Mariana replied and fished in her pocket for the note she’d scribbled down earlier that morning. “I’m looking for either Frank or Pablo,” she added after checking the names she’d written down.

“Huh,” the man said but turned and waved for her to follow. “This way.”

He led her through the tangle of poles, cables, and tent fabric until they reached an unmarked trailer. The man knocked twice, opened the door, and then poked his head in.

“You call about stuffing our animals?” he asked.

There was a brief flurry of what sounded like papers and someone getting up from a chair, scooting it back along a cheap linoleum floor. A few heavy footsteps later and the short, broad man exited the trailer, pushing Mariana’s guide out of the way without a second glance.

“Mariana!” he exclaimed excitedly. “So glad you could come so quickly. We were having a terrible time deciding what to do and here you are like a miracle.”

Mariana glanced over the short man, she wasn’t sure whether this was Frank or Pablo. The worker who had taken her here met her eyes and shrugged before turning back and returning to whatever job he’d previously been doing.

“The animals are this way, Mariana,” the short man said without any loss in his enthusiasm and took her by the arm gently but confidently.

Soon he was leading her back through the maze of deconstruction until they reached one of the few tents that was still standing. It was a decently large tent, probably twelve feet tall at the peak, and the walls ran along the ground in either direction for at least thirty feet. Smells of hay and dropping wafted from the open door.

“This is the place!” the man stated as though he were still performing as the ringmaster, which Mariana was suspecting he was with every excited exclamation. “Not many circus’s still use live animals these days but we’ve made it work up until now.”

He motioned, a bit melodramatically in Mariana’s opinion, for her to enter first. He followed swiftly behind her, rubbing his hands as though they were cold. His face bore a perpetual smile and his stature and features kept reminding her of a little boy about to get a treat.

Turning her attention away from the man, Mariana began looking around for the animals she was here to collect. There were several pens in the tent, housing a pair of camels, some horses, a pair of ostriches, and a kennel full of various breeds of dogs. In the far corner was a fully enclosed cage with a white tiger that was pacing back and forth while gently letting out a low, rumbling sound. She didn’t see any animals that were dead, however.

“These are lovely,” she said. “Do you have the other ones stored somewhere else for me?”

“Oh, no, no, no, these are the ones,” the man said, nodding his head and waving towards all the animals with broad sweeps of both arms. “It’s a pity but we’ve got to let them all go, I’m afraid. The expense, you know,” he added with the first hint of anything besides a grin as his smile turned into a grimace for a few seconds.

“I’m sorry,” Mariana replied, “but I only work with animals that were either legally hunted or else died of natural causes. I believe I said so on the phone.”

“Oh yes, Frank did mention that,” the man, who Mariana now assumed was Pablo, said lightly while waving his hand as if to clear smoke from the air. “What I meant was that all the animals are terribly sick. Must have caught something since we’ve been here and I can’t stand to see them suffer and we simply don’t have the money to get them all treated so we felt that this would be the best way to honor their memory and…memorialize them.”

She was no vet but none of the animals looked sick to her. She looked back towards the man, Pablo, who was still standing there, beaming and letting his hands swing back and forth while he rocked on the balls of his feet. She wondered if he was capable of ever standing still. Probably a byproduct of working in a circus, or perhaps he worked in the circus because he had all that boundless energy. Either way, she wasn’t liking this situation. Legally, most of the animals here could be put down and given to her to work on but as a rule she didn’t like doing that. She felt it encouraged a certain kind of disposable mentality when it came to animals and she’d gotten into the business of taxidermy in an effort to preserve rather than discard. The tiger, however, she knew was illegal to kill thanks to its protected status.

“I’m sure they’ll all be dead by this evening,” Pablo pressed when the silence between them grew a bit too pronounce. “We’d be doing them all a service by ending their suffering, poor things.”

She wanted to just say no and walk away but she knew if she did then the animals would likely be shot and wind up in a landfill. She could report the circus to the police but the circus was a ways out from any of the cities and it would be left to the county sheriff’s office to come and investigate it and, well, she’d known more than a few people who called with relatively serious issues before that took hours, or sometimes days to get an officer out to check in on it. Mariana had no way of judging how quickly the circus was packing up or how much longer they’d be around for.

She pulled her phone out and opened the audio recorder.

“What did they catch?” Mariana asked, stalling for time while she thought. “You don’t mind if I take some notes, do you?” she added, gesturing with her phone.

“Hmm? What’s that?” Pablo’s smile slipped a little but his expression looked more like he hadn’t heard her rather than frustration at having to answer more questions.

“I’m recording some notes,” she said as calmly as she could. “What did they catch?”

“Oh, something, I don’t know. They’re just suffering.”

“Is that what your vet said?” Mariana asked.

“We don’t have a vet on staff,” he chortled. “There’s usually hardly any need for one. No, we take good care of our beloved animals.”

“So you called one in to check on them?”

“Called who in?” Pablo looked absolutely perplexed for a couple of seconds before his eyes widened and he gave her a toothy smile. “Oh, right, yes of course. But no, you see we know our animals so intimately that this morning when we were inspecting them and getting them all ready for transit that we found them all just so terribly sick. Animals are so good at concealing when they’re feeling ill that by the time it’s showing, well…there’s only so much you can do.”

He clasped his hands in front of himself, taking on a mournful expression but still rocking back and forth from his toes to his heels and back again.

“And once they were all taxidermized,” Mariana pressed, “you’d want them all shipped to you? Wherever the circus happened to be by then?”

“Oh my that would be fabulous, wouldn’t it?” Pablo crowed. “We could line them all up along the entrance, maybe even put a few motors in some of them, eh? But, uh, no. The size of the crates they’d need to be shipped in, not to mention the postage, I’m afraid we barely make enough as it is to break even most months. Such is the life of the humble circus.”

“But you can afford to have them all taxidermized? And what are you going to do with them once they’ve been preserved?”

“Well, as luck would have it,” Pablo gave her a conspiratorial wink, “as I was bemoaning the fate of these dear creatures this morning, a young man happened to be passing through and heard of our plight. He is a lover of animals and has a rather impressive collection of both living and stuffed, and it’s he who has offered to cover all of the expenses as well as house them all once you’re finished. A fine solution for us all, wouldn’t you say? He gets to improve his collection, you get a fine bit of work, and I get the peace of mind knowing that they’re all being taken care of in the best possible way, given their poor health.”

The more she stood there, talking with Pablo the more she wanted to do something. He’d clearly been offered some money for the animals by a collector and was happy to take the money and dump the animals. She doubted very much that the dogs and everything that wasn’t exotic were part of the deal, or maybe the collector had been talked into it in order to allow the circus to get rid of all their animals. Mariana didn’t know and she didn’t want to know. The details were irrelevant.

“You could reach out to a zoo,” she suggested. “I know plenty would be interested in the tiger or ostriches.”

“Not when they’re so close to death,” Pablo replied. “There’s so much paperwork and health requirements that they’d be long gone before we could ever get them handed over to them.”

“What about the dogs?” she asked. “The collector wants all of them preserved as well?”

“I…am uncertain,” he said, hesitating. “I have his contact information and was going to pass it on to you once we’ve transported them to your, uh, workshop. He’s on business for a few days, he said, but you should be able to reach him in a day or two.”

That raised another red flag in Mariana’s mind. Was there even a collector then, or was all of it a fabrication? Was Pablo trying to dump a bunch of dead animals on her and then leave her with a bad number while they got out of town?

“It’s standard procedure for 75% to be paid up front,” she said. “I wasn’t given a full listing of what animals you had, or how exactly they’re supposed to be prepared, but even a dog will cost around a thousand dollars.”

“I think he had a sort of…diorama in mind,” he said with grand gestures.

“And you’ve filed your paperwork for the tiger?” she asked.

“Oh, poor thing,” Pablo even sniffed. “You know, when we got her, it was from someone who really shouldn’t have had her in the first place, you know the type. New money and not sure what to do with it and he’d gone and bought himself a tiger before he knew what he was doing. Didn’t go through the right channels and all that. Next thing he knew he had a cub, plucked from the wild. Well, he didn’t know what to do and I was friends with his uncle so word got round to me and I agreed to take the poor kitten. Half starved and full of worms when we first got her, but she survived and we’ve had a lifetime of joy with her. Until now.”

“So you don’t have any documentation for the tiger?”

“No, but as you can see it’s hardly my fault and we were doing her a mercy in taking her into our family. I’m sure you won’t begrudge us our generosity.”

“Okay,” Mariana said, “I need to go back and get my big truck. Should only take an hour. Don’t put them down until I get back,” she added with a bit more haste than she had intended. “I’ve had mounts ruined when people didn’t know how to put an animal down and ended up with a mangled hide.”

“Of course!” Pablo exclaimed, overjoyed at Mariana’s apparent agreement to take the animals. We should have most of this cleared away by then so you should have a nice, private place here to, uh, to give them the peace they deserve.”

She nodded and made her way back over to her truck. A few of the workers watched her go but no one stopped her. In her hand she still held her phone and only once she got back into her truck did she stop the audio recording. She played back the first few parts to make sure it was clear that she’d told Pablo that she was recording their conversation. She couldn’t remember when or where she’d learned that recorded conversations could only be used in legal cases if the other person knew they were being recorded. Or maybe it was you had to get permission unless you had a warrant? She didn’t know. Maybe she didn’t need permission. Regardless, she had told him she was recording the conversation and he didn’t tell her not to. Of course, he didn’t explicitly say yes either, but it was the best she could hope for.

Her workshop wasn’t that far away, and she didn’t have a bigger truck, but the sheriff’s department was a fifteen minute drive away. She figured it would take her at least another twenty minute, maybe half an hour to convince them to listen to the recording and then go back with her to cease the animals and get them sent to…well, wherever rescued animals would be sent. Everything hinged on the tiger. The other animals probably weren’t protected but she knew for a fact that the tiger was, and Pablo had admitted to having obtained it illegally. How he’d managed to avoid being caught for so long was beyond her but that didn’t matter now.

As she drove, she couldn’t help but give a wry smile. So often she was accused of hating animals, and she could kind of see those people’s perspectives. Killing animals for the sake of killing them never made much sense to her, but she loved how beautiful the animals were. Without the work that she did, how would anyone ever be able to stand so close to them? Even deer or raccoons could hurt you if you got too close and spooked them.

But what Pablo and Frank were doing, getting rid of them because of what? They were expensive? They could sell most of them off, or donate them. Was it just too much effort? Not worth their time? Maybe they were worried that people would get curious about their tiger and find out it was illegal. It didn’t matter. Pablo clearly didn’t care about them and he was looking to dump them off on her. Her grip on the steering wheel tightened as she turned onto the highway.

Later that evening, as she leaned against her truck, now parked on the far side of the field where the circus had been, she watched as figures moved about the partially packed away tents and bleachers. The shocked look on Pablo’s face when she’d returned with a police escort was priceless. It turned out he was more than capable of standing still. He didn’t bob or sway back and forth at all the entire time she was there, listening to the police explain to him why they were there and why he was in very, very big trouble. They got a search warrant pretty quickly and, from what Mariana had gathered before leaving to stand by her truck, a lot of things were found out besides just an illegal tiger that Pablo had wanted to keep secret.

It was going to be sunset soon and there was an elk waiting for her back at home to get started on. The form had just come in and she wanted to begin stretching the hide over it.