Crystal Falls

Orin goes through about four hundred pounds of salt every fall.

He's a taxidermist, and he works out of a converted two-car garage behind his house a few miles outside Crystal Falls in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and from the first of October, when bow season opens, until the end of rifle season, hunters bring him deer to mount.

Before a hide can go off to the tannery, it has to be fleshed and then buried in fine stock salt to pull the water out of it, and he does that part outdoors, under a lean-to roof on the back wall of the shop, where he's got slanted racks built out of treated lumber so the brine can run off into the gravel.

The salt comes in fifty-pound bags from the feed mill, and he keeps them stacked on a pallet under that same roof.

Teague was twelve that fall.

He caught the school bus at the end of the driveway at five past seven, and his habit was to eat his cereal standing at the kitchen sink where the window looks out across the backyard at the shop.

His mother, Bettina, was a rural mail carrier out of the Crystal Falls post office, and she left the house at ten past six, six mornings a week, in a right-hand drive Jeep with the family's beagle riding on the seat beside her.

Oren was usually still in the shower at that hour.

Kinda describe what's it like.

The manufacturing facility is located in the Crystal Falls area of Michigan.

Um, we've been there for a number of years now, and that's our true manufacturing facility.

Um, all of the materials that we bring in from a lumber and hardwood standpoint start there, going through a multiple process, section by section, piece by piece, um, type manufacturing situation, where it goes from a air dry yard to a kiln dried specific oven-type facility.

Enjoy.

In February 2017, 34-year-old Kelly Cochran was up on the witness stand in the Iron County Courthouse in Crystal Falls, Michigan.

She wore a striped, long-sleeved sweater over a cream-colored turtleneck.

Her hair was pulled back tightly in a bun.