PANA - The secret of dead deer nostrils is to make them look lovely again, dark and deep.

Pana taxidermist Wes Holthaus has a newly mounted deer head on his studio wall, its nostrils filled with white tissue paper. The tissue keeps everything in the proper alignment while glues, epoxy and other chemical alchemy meld their magic, the result being a flaring dark nostril in a vibrant face turned, too late, to the scent of man in the forest.

"You want it to look real alive; you want it to look right," says Holthaus, 20. "And you want it to look nice."

The deer holds a mouthful of pins and looks, for now, like a woodland dressmaker, sizing you up for a fit with its voluminous brown glass eyes. There are more pins in the corners of the eyes, and they serve the same purpose - holding a stitched and glued cape (the animals' head, neck and partial shoulder) in place at critical points. Stretched to position over a pre-molded plastic foam form while damp, the idea is to retain everything just so until the cape dries perfectly to shape.

Introduced to hunting as a teenager, Holthaus had soon fallen in love with the preservation mastery of taxidermy (from the Greek, meaning "arrangement of skin"). So much so, he took himself off to the Missouri Taxidermy Institute at the age of 18 and spent eight intensive weeks learning to enshrine the brief lives of hunted game, fish and fowl.

"When I went to school, they gave you a dead pheasant, and you just had to hop right into it and start doing it," recalls Holthaus. "You're there eight hours a day, five days a week, but you haven't got much time, considering all you have to learn. It's kind of shocking how you go from not knowing what you're doing to being able to do this."

His "Outback Taxidermy" business has built a steady clientele as word of his prowess has spread, but every good artist needs a gallery to win new customers, and Holthaus has found a surprisingly successful venue at Holthaus Heating & Appliance. It's not unusual to see shoppers, wandering by the store at 207 S. Locust, do a double take as they lock eyes with a mountain lion staring back at them from amid the Maytags. There are also an elk, a wild turkey, a pheasant, a trout and a crappie. And look carefully to spot the gray fox posed amid foliage as if about to pounce on a hapless, cowering quail.

"I just thought having them in there would be a good advertisement for both of us," said Mike Holthaus, 44, the uncle of the taxidermist, who owns the store. "And we do get a lot of people stopping to look in that window."

Flamboyant taxidermy is nothing new, however. Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan created a lot of controversy with his artwork of a "taxidermised" horse called "The Ballad of Trotsky," which involved suspending the preserved animal from a ceiling. Cattelan, who once posed a squirrel to look like it had taken its own life while sitting at a kitchen table, is known for being out there. But he's in the money, too - that dangling equine fetched $2.1 million when auctioned in New York.

The Pana taxidermist has a much more modest fee scale, charging just $280 for a shoulder-mounted whitetail deer and only $125 for a full-bodied pheasant you could suspend from your own ceiling. He doesn't have many limits, either, with a price list that runs to black bear, pronghorn antelope and "elk - traditional," or "elk - bugling," but he does have some preferences, based on his own very much alive nostrils.

"I'll do fish, but I really don't like to do them," explains Holthaus. "They just usually smell real bad ¦ deer can smell real bad, too, but not as bad as the fish."

Tony Reid can be reached at treid@herald-review.com or 421-7977.