Mound City, Mo. ? Pity the poor python and his cold-weather dining. Charles Mollus found the offending rabbit gullet-deep in the snake.

Handlers from a Pennsylvania reptile garden hauled the snake, all 20 feet and 240 pounds of him, to a 1985 sports show in Kansas City. They fed him a bunny snack while the python coiled in the back of a van.

Sadly, and it was no treat for the rabbit either, the snake lacked the sufficient body temperature to properly take in the food. In short order, it suffocated.

Making lemonade from the lemons of this show-biz mishap, it was determined this imposing creature should remain in the public eye, albeit inanimately. Mollus, who began skinning and stuffing animals nearly 40 years before, got the call.

Limber, heavy and more than a little creepy, the snake made its way to Mollus Taxidermist Shop in Mound City in the trunk of a car. It would leave in stuffed form in one of the few conveyances agreeable to its length, a horse trailer.

“It was an unusual mount, I’ll tell you that,” the shop owner said.

Geese, groundhogs, too

Nothing much daunts Mollus in the way of wildlife coming through his door. He’s preserved foxes, bobcats, bears and groundhogs, not to mention thousands of deer, turkeys, geese and fish. His clientele extends from California to Connecticut, many of them attracted to the good hunting and fishing around the Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge.

The front room of his State Street shop is part museum and part storage for finished mountings. The fowl of the air and the fish of the stream look down on anyone entering, and it remains a popular stop for school field trips.

In the back room, the antlered head of a bull elk bagged in Colorado greets guests, a work in progress with pins holding the hide in place until it cures. Here, too, you get a cup of hot coffee on a cold day, as do regulars who stop by to discuss the day’s news.

Pop-ins don’t slow the proprietor. “I can work and chew gum at the same time,” he said.

Second career

And the work remains plentiful. In some years, he would take in and mount 200 deer and 200 ducks, plus the other assorted critters that might come his way. To cut back in recent years, the 73-year-old taxidermist now limits himself to 100 of each. (He conceded it slipped up to 115 deer this year, though the poor bird hunting season brought him only 50 or 60 fowl.)

“I always have something to do every day,” Mollus said. “I don’t need to advertise. I turn work away.”

Not bad for a retiree. His first interest turned into a second career.

He trapped at a young age and sold the skins. If you can skin animals, he figured, you can mount them. So he sent away to the J.W. Elwood Taxidermy Supply Co. in Omaha, Neb., for a how-to course.

“I think every kid in the country started there,” Mollus said.

The boy learned the techniques and began mounting birds at age 14.

In 1950, Charles and a couple of cousins joined the Marines. Three months later, he was in Korea. “That’s how they ran you through,” he said of an overseas stay that lasted 14 months.

Evolving hobby

When he returned to St. Joseph from the military, he went to work for the city’s museum, cleaning, cutting grass, helping build displays. The fire chief ran into him one day and said he needed some men. “I told him I didn’t want to be a fireman,” Mollus said.

But the museum job provided no real place to grow. So after a time he took up the fire chief’s offer. He would be a fireman for 27 years.

“I loved fighting fires, but I hated fighting City Hall,” he said.

Mollus set up a work bench in the Fire Station No. 11 and practiced his taxidermy hobby between blazes. After he retired from the force in 1982, he moved to a farm near Mound City and opened a business.

Taxidermy evolved since his early days. Mounting a deer head once meant boiling the skull. Now, companies make foam forms of various sizes, with some strategically placed wooden blocks to anchor the antlers and attach to the base.

There are glass eyes that are adhered with Critter Clay and plastic liners that help keep the ears at attention. It still takes a week for the skin to properly dry, longer for the elk. “These things have a hide a quarter-inch thick,” he said.

Mollus still makes bird bodies the old way, molding handfuls of excelsior — a product of finely curled wood shavings — to accommodate the many sizes of fowl. He likewise does the fish from scratch, building a body then putting a quarter-inch of filler just inside the skin.

Creating heirlooms

On the table are paints for touching up fish and duck bills and feet. “Every bird’s not the same,” he said. “They’re all alike, and they’re all different.”

He waves off any suggestion of artistry, but his fish mounts are often displayed not on plaques but alongside driftwood collected from area streams. “I just thought it looked better on natural wood,” Mollus said.

And the finished piece becomes not just a trophy but an heirloom, something handed down and meant to last. The weevils that eat the hair of mounted deer are easily abated by a rotation of moth balls.

“I mounted deer heads for people 40 years ago, and they’ve still got them,” Mollus said. “Birds will last longer than that.”

He loved life on the farm, where there were always sheep and goats, potbellied pigs and peacocks. All pets. So were the emus and guineas. But his five children live in St. Joseph, not to mention his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, so he and his wife, Sue, moved back last year.

Mollus keeps the business open and plans to continue into the foreseeable future. “I ain’t dead yet,” he said. “Why quit when I feel good?”