LEWISTON — Mr. Drew had warned me that the smell of the rotting carcass was going to bad and yet when that fearsome black stench rose up out of the makeshift grave, I felt completely unprepared for it. 

The distinct scent of decay assailed me like a living thing. It enfolded me completely and caused me to stumble back a few steps in retreat. The stench filled my nostrils — it seemed, in fact, to fill my entire head. 

Drew Desjardins though, of Mr. Drew and His Animals, Too, stood over the grave unfazed. This was nothing, he told me. I should have been here the day the carcass was brought in from Portland. Back then, the stench of decay was so foul and enormous that even the vultures wouldn’t come near it. 

“They were up there circling for two or three days,” said Drew. “But they wouldn’t touch it. I don’t know if it’s because it’s a marine animal or if it was just too rancid for even the vultures.” 

All of this was interesting, of course, but the analysis of stink was not the reason I was standing with Drew in the the backyard of his Lewiston home. 

The bigger story involved the plans Drew had for this rotting carcass. It was about the educational value of rot and decay — the cycle of life and all of that. 

I hadn’t come just to plug my nose and shoo away flies. 

I had come to see the dolphin. 

‘EVEN IN DEATH, THERE IS BEAUTY’ 

The story of how Mr. Drew came into possession of an 8-foot long, 500 pound bottlenose dolphin and her baby is a wild one. Even wilder is the story of how that dead sea mammal made its way from Portland to Lewiston, straight down the turnpike and right out in the open for legions of highway commuters to goggle at. 

“We actually had to call ahead to the State Police to alert them of the transport since they would likely be getting calls,” says Jennifer Marchigiani, who hauled the dolphin to Lewiston in the back of her GMC 2500 HD pickup truck. 

And during every inch of the drive, said Marchigiani, who runs Misfits Rehab in Auburn, there was the fear that the dead dolphin was so bloated with death gasses that it might explode at any time. 

All of this drama because officials in Portland could not figure out what to do with the dead dolphin and her baby, which had washed up on shore in early May. 

The carcasses had washed up onto the shores of an island off the coast of Portland — reportedly, some islanders had tried to simply push the creatures back into the water without success.  

The dolphin was later lashed to a mooring, but with the stink and with the fact that Memorial Day was fast approaching, the islanders wanted the creatures gone. 

Ruthann Weist, Portland’s animal control officer, contacted Mr. Drew and asked if he’d be interested in the dolphin remains. You know, for educational purposes. 

The adventurous Mr. Drew, who has both living and dead creatures of all kinds in his Lewiston showroom, took a look at a photo of the dead dolphin. In that first photo, the animal didn’t look all that big. In fact, he thought he was looking at just a single baby dolphin.  

How hard could it be to manage one of those? 

Drew would later learn the actual size of the mammal he agreed to take during a conversation with the person who had first discovered the animal washed up on the island.  

“He said he was real surprised to hear I was taking a 500-pound dolphin. I said, ‘Ah … what?'” 

The creature was bigger than he’d anticipated, but Drew didn’t back out of the deal. He just had to adjust his measure of how much work this affair would require. 

Before the dolphin could be transported, Drew and Weist needed to secure permission from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

Since Mr. Drew and His Animals, Too is an educational center, NOAA agreed to let them take possession of the dolphin, provided all the necessary paperwork was filled. Once all that was taken care of, it was go time. 

GOING ‘NOSE BLIND’ 

In planning to take possession of the dolphins, Drew had contacted Marchigiani to ask if she’d be interested in making a really strange, really stinky road trip. Turns out Marchigiani, who launched Misfits Rehab in Auburn in 2002, is every bit as adventurous as Mr. Drew himself. 

In Portland, the dead dolphins had been towed to shore and once Marchigiani had her truck backed up, the carcasses were loaded on with a forklift. 

“The smell,” she said, “was pretty crazy.” 

And then the dolphins’ strange journey continued north to Lewiston. 

“Jen messaged me and asked if I had a plan to get the dolphin out of the truck,” Drew recalls, “and I simply reassured her by letting her know that I was making this all up as I go. While I was waiting for their arrival, I changed into clothes that I was going to throw away and started digging the hole for my Bone Box.” 

Once Marchigiani arrived at Drew’s Lewiston home, Drew used rope and took advantage of the truck bed’s slight incline to nudge the creature into his yard. 

Plop. Down it came. 

A hole had been dug in Drew’s yard and a rugged storage container prepared to house the remains. But first there was the matter of hacking up the rancid carcass so that all the pieces would fit in the box. 

It’s the kind of job that nobody wants. 

Almost nobody that is. 

Enter Arianna Linee and Kaitlyn Rowe, a pair of employees at Mr. Drew and His Animals, Too. 

“They were like, ‘Can we help with this?'” Drew recalls. “And I was like, ‘You’re sick! But yes.’ I would be willing to bet they are the president and vice president of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club.” 

Drew carefully removed the dead baby dolphin from its mother before Linee and Rowe went about the grisly work of cutting up the remains.  

It was, as Rowe put it, a putrid affair. 

“I remember being so excited to go over to Mr. Drew’s,” she says. “I didn’t fully grasp what would be happening until we arrived. The moment you stepped out of the car, you got smacked in the face with the most foul smell I have ever had the misfortune of experiencing. But it didn’t take away from the enthusiasm — never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I’d find myself shoulder deep removing the internal organs of a three-week-old rotting dolphin.” 

And it wasn’t just the smell. 

“Cutting through the hide is the hardest thing I have ever had to cut through,” Rowe says. “We destroyed Mrs. Drew’s brand new filet knife and dulled at least two other knives, and, I think, two saws. About 30 minutes in, I went almost completely ‘nose blind,’ which was very beneficial to being able to complete the three-hour-long task. Even though it was incredibly slimy, unbearably smelly, I would happily do it again. “ 

Linee was perhaps a little more prepared for the task, having received training from Wicked Critters Taxidermy in Litchfield. But when it came time to cut up the dolphin, she found that this creature was considerably more “blubbery” than anything she’d tackled before. 

All they had for tools was a single knife and Susan Drew’s brand new $70 filet knife, which was completely destroyed. 

Also destroyed were Linee’s Dr. Marten boots, not that she was complaining. 

“All in all it was an amazing experience,” Linee says. “There are a lot of things, while working for the Drews, I’d say ‘I’d never thought I’d be doing this in my life but here I am.’ And fleshing the eight-foot, 500-pound blubber monster is definitely No. 1 most extraordinary experience — but knowing Drew, we will do something more crazy in the coming years.” 

When it was over, Drew and Susan Desjardins had to figure out what do do with hundreds of pounds of rotting flesh left drawing flies in their yard. 

The flesh was ultimately taken by a group in Auburn called Compassionate Composting, which specializes in “the respectful and dignified pick-up, handling, transport and composting of horses and other large animals after their death.” 

And so, aside from the stink of death that will linger all summer, the grisly part of the work was over. All of the planning, all of the networking and all of the gruesome work was done so that the leftover dolphin pieces could be packed into a box and buried in Drew’s yard. 

THE BONE BOX

“A bone box,” Drew explains, is what you put the carcass in to let the worms, flies and beetles do their work of cleaning the flesh off the bones.” 

As I looked down on what remained of the dolphin that day in Drew’s backyard, those flies and worms and beetles were about their work aplenty. There were thousands of them in there, devouring any remaining meat, gristle or tissue, turning death into a feast. 

Someday — Drew has never worked with dolphin remains before and so has no idea how long full decomposition will take — only bones will remain in Mr. Drew’s bone box. But the journey of dolphin mother and child will not be over still. 

Once the bones are all that’s left, Drew will clean them further and send them off to a friend at the University of Maine. 

“He and his grad students will put these bones back together again,” Drew says. 

Once the bones are reconstructed into a skeleton, they will be put on display at Mr. Drew and His Animals, Too’s space at 20 East Ave. in Lewiston, taking their place among the myriad animal wonders already on exhibit there. 

They will hang suspended from the ceiling in an area not far from a glassed case featuring the bones of other animals, from the smallest varmints to the great horned critters from the forests. 

The dolphins will experience a reincarnation of sorts, and in this new incarnation, they will be used to educate, as all bones are at Mr. Drew’s. 

To illustrate this, Drew plucks a tiny skull out of the display case at his place. 

“Take something like this,” he says. “I’ll ask the kids, ‘What do you think this is? You want to be a paleontologist, tell me everything you can about this skull.’ And we’ll go through all their thoughts on it.” 

T’was a rabbit skull, that one. I had guessed it was a squirrel. 

DEATH BE NOT PROUD 

There is also a lot to be learned through the actual decomposition process, Drew maintains. 

At his showroom, there is a tank where dead animals go to be stripped down by scavenger beetles known as dermestidae, or skin beetles. 

Kids and others who come to Mr. Drew and His Animals, Too educational center can watch as the beetles strip down to the bone dead critters that most of us would just drive around on the highway. 

“They can see nature in action this way,” Drew says. “They can see how efficiently the bugs clean things up.” 

The rotting away of dolphin mother and child will be done more privately, in the bone box buried in Drew’s yard. It may take long months for the fleshy remains of the aquatic creatures to be cleared away completely. 

But sooner or later, the mother dolphin will have a second life of sorts, swimming in the air alongside its calf so that visitors to Mr. Drew and His Animals, Too can get a better understanding of the inner workings of these sea creatures. 

In the end, the mother dolphin will have its dignity again, thanks to a team of committed animal lovers who plunged headlong into rancid death itself to make sure her demise will mean something.