The right stuff

VIDRINE -- Arthur Courville thought one of his friends was playing a joke on him.
The longtime taxidermist picked up the phone one day back in 1978, and on the other end of the line a distraught woman requested Courville to do something for her. A request that remains to this day the top oddity of his 56-year mounting career.
The woman pleaded with Courville to stuff and mount her pet -- a pet tiger that is.
“I thought it was a prank call,” Courville said. “No taxidermists do pets. We might do birds but that’s it. The reason is because you can’t recreate the animal’s expression that the human has seen all of their life.
“I mean she showed me photos of it laying in the bed and playing with her kids,” Courville remembered. “I mean it was declawed but Lord mercy it could have broken their necks with just a slap of its paw.”
As Courville remembers, the lady and her husband bought the tiger when he was three weeks old either in Michigan or Minnesota, before relocating to Oakdale in nearby Allen Parish. The tiger grew up around the kids and every afternoon the woman would take the tiger outside and tie it around the big oak tree in the backyard.
This particular day though she went outside to bring him inside but he was laid on his side dead.
“So she called and she was crying the poor thing,” Courville said. “So I listened to her and started thinking about if I could do it. But then she tells me she wanted it mounted in a calm position like a house cat. I thought to myself there was no taxidermist supply that has that body.’”
Courville though was undaunted and eventually produced a body from scratch. His mount would allow the woman to keep her pet with her always, including while running errands around town.
“She would have him riding in the back of her Suburban,” Courville laughed. “That was the weirdest thing I ever mounted for sure.”
In his five-plus decades of stuffing and mounting prized trophies for outdoorsmen, Courville, who is always accompanied in his shop by his Golden Labrador named Boots, has done everything from alligators, wild boars, loggerhead sea turtles, big mouth bass, squirrels, ducks and of course deer heads. Taxidermy is his life’s passion.
“If a person goes hunting and kills a duck or deer as a trophy, the pleasure I get out of it is trying to recreate that moment,” Courville said. “That last moment when it was alive. That way they can pass it down to their kids or grandkids.”
Courville was raised on a rice farm outside of Chataignier and grew up hunting and fishing in the woods and bayous that surrounded the farm. It wasn’t until one day that he tagged along with his father on a trip to town that Courville became intrigued by taxidermy.
“I was with my daddy one day at the old sale barn there in Eunice where they would sell cattle and horses,” Courville remembered. “In the lobby where you pick up your check there were two deer heads mounted on the wall. I started to observe them and I became real curious about it.”
That curiosity continued until one day back in 1960, Courville was looking over the ads on the back cover of a Field & Stream magazine, and there on the page was a single ad for taxidermy. The only thing preventing Courville from learning his life’s work was $10.
“This was the only course offered and it was out of Omaha, Nebraska and it was called the Northwestern School of Taxidermy,” Courville said. “I managed to squeeze $10 out of daddy and we sent off for the course.”
The 14-year-old would spend the next year pouring over the books that were periodically sent to him in the mail. The first book was on birds and others soon followed, until he finally received his official certificate.
With his books, Courville began practicing his craft in the corner of his family’s barn but not many of those early mounts survived.
“I would do it in the corner of the barn,” Courville remembered. “Which wasn’t very good because the rats would give me a rough time. They would eat half of my mounts.”
Courville would soon get his work space inside the barn, as he allowed his father to sell his albino horse for a $150 at the sale barn in Eunice. That money was used to pay a local carpenter to built a 15 x 20 building on the farm for Courville to work on producing outdoorsmen’s prized trophies.
At one time Courville had an estimated 90 mounts in that small working space, but most of those he didn’t kill himself. Courville’s early work was a result of others generosity.
“I didn’t actually start doing mounts for customers until I was out of school,” Courville said. “More or less I just did it for myself. A lot of my neighbors, friends and family members would just give me mounts, like ducks or foxes or raccoons. That was my training.”
Courville’s path to owning his own taxidermy studio took an unexpected turn after he graduated from high school. During an unexpected visit to the LSU Natural History Museum in Baton Rouge, Courville would meet his future mentor.
It was there that Courville was introduced to Museum Director Ambrose Daigre, who had his own taxidermy business located on Highland Drive. The two talked and Daigre quickly offered Courville a job to work for him at his studio. Despite being wary of living in a large city like Baton Rouge, the country boy from Evangeline Parish jumped at the opportunity.
“I was fortunate that I had a cousin whose husband was going to college at LSU,” Courville said. “So she let me live with them while I was working at the studio.
“He really refined me,” Courville said. “He gave me ideas about mounting ducks. When a bird is alive his head and cheeks are fluffy. Back then I wasn’t doing anything with the cheeks in my mounts so he showed me how to take cotton and put it in the cheeks to make it look more lively again.”
In the four years he spent working with Daigre, Courville would be part of building dioramas for the Zigler Art Museum in Jennings, as well as displays at Mississippi State University.
“Time went by so fast,” Courville said. “When you’re doing something you love there is never enough time in the day. An old neighbor of mine once told me that ‘somebody that loves what they are doing will always be successful’”
Courville, who met his wife while working for Daigre, stayed in Baton Rouge for roughly three months after the wedding, before moving to the Vidrine area, where she was from. Courville got a job working at a wholesale company in nearby Mamou but it wasn’t long before he began making mounts for Evangeline Parish hunters.
“Nobody knew me from Adam around here,” Courville said. “But people started hearing about my work and that first year I got 11 deer heads. The business took off from there and every year it would increase.”
Courville’s side business would continue to grow as he still maintained shift work at the wholesale company, then at the old Dresser Industries drill bit plant in Eunice, and then in the oil field.
Despite working long hours, Courville developed a reputation of producing quick turnarounds on his mounts, something he still takes great pride in to this day.
“A lot of people came to me because of the quick turnaround,” said Courville, who always makes sure last season’s trophies are completed by the start of the new season. “They don’t want to wait a year or two for their mounts. After two years you done forgot what you had killed. I mean they don’t make any money by staying in the freezer.”
That doesn’t mean that Courville ever rushed his process.
“It’s not like taking a shovel and digging a ditch,” Courville said. “Even when I had two jobs, I would never pressure myself with time with my mounts.”
Courville’s favorite animal to mount are birds. In his opinion, doing deer heads is more “mechanical” and less creative than recreating a bird’s flight. Not surprising considering that Courville also has a passion for painting wildlife, an example of that is the blue jay painting on Masonite Board that hangs above the window in his shop.
Before he can gut the bird, make the incisions between the breasts and along the head, clean out the rest of the fat with a chemical solution, make by hand the body with straw and cotton yarn, camouflage the hunter’s buck shot that damaged a wing with a subtle placement of the wings, put it all back together and then add a touch of paint on the duck’s feet and bills, Courville stresses one thing to his clients.
“Always place the duck’s head underneath the wing,” Courville said. “With my experience over the years that is the best way to do it. They would bring me a duck that is frozen and fully stretched out. So I put that in the freezer and some other animal rolls over it and then you have a broken neck. I always emphasize to tuck the head.”
Courville may prefer ducks, and his weirdest mount was of course that lady’s tiger but the most challenging was an African Cape Buffalo he did for a client from Pine Prairie.
“This was the hardest thing I ever done,” Courville said. “That thing weighed 2,000 pounds. The horns alone weighed 47 pounds. It took three months for the hide to come through customs.”
The weight of the beast was the least of Courville’s worries.
“When I received the hide, any part of the hide from the ears back was an inch thick,” Courville said. “I have an electronic fleshing machine and I can do anything from elk to moose on there but this hide was like dealing with sheet metal.”
Courville called the manufacturing company for his machine, and they recommended that he send the hide to a special tannery. The tannery grinded down that hide to eighth of an inch thick and Courville finished the job.
That proved to be the last African Cape Buffalo he would do.
“The guy’s friend was going on a hunt that next year and he wanted to know what he needed to do to have me mount it,” Courville said. “I told him that I didn’t want it. There was no amount of money for me to do that again. I told him to leave it over there and have it mounted over there.”
As he is now mounting trophies for the third or fourth generations of some families, Courville continues to be passionate about taxidermy, even though he may no longer take on certain projects like alligators or turtles. Not the fire that destroyed his shop in 1998 or his advanced age (70), has slowed down Courville from his life’s work.
Just don’t expect to see any of his personal trophies in his shop.
“I have had a lot of customers ask to see my trophy room over the years,’ Courville said. “I joke with them and point to my shop and say ‘this is it.’ This is my art but these are not my trophies to keep. They are my customers and that’s how it should be.”