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An old lady answers the phone and the word “Hellooooo?” falls slowly from her mouth.

“You’re a taxidermist, right?”

“Huuh?” she replies.

“Do you have a rump monkey?”

Click.

Must have been a wrong number. Turns out taxidermists work from home, and then, when they move, stick the new residents with confusing phone calls.

There are a lot of cool animals available for stuffing in Florida: gators, marlin, and all types of birds, manatees, and panthers. (OK, I’m just joking about the last two, calm down EPA.) But I wasn’t interested in writing about, or seeing any of that “real life” junk.

If you are going to skin, gut, stuff and de-eyeball an animal, you might as well turn it into something cool, like a unicorn or jackalope. It’s called crypto-taxidermy, and it has evolved into an art form – mixing and matching different animal body parts to make a new, fantasy animal.

The rump monkey, a manifestation of taxidermist humor, is a deer’s tucus with added eyes and other features, stretched to make it look like a monkey face. But not that many people make rump monkeys. There isn’t much of a market for it, and parents aren’t exactly pushing their children toward careers in taxidermy these days. Hunting the rump monkey is an exercise in patience, much like pursuing those other elusive creatures of the human imagination. Forget the yeti, the abominable snowman, big foot, and, yes, the skunk ape – I want the rump monkey.

Unfortunately, the one person I knew who had a rump monkey was out of town. So I decided to look elsewhere and see what I could find.

First, I went to see hunter-turned-taxidermist Bob Dorta in North Naples. Dorta, 38, was just getting started after going to taxidermy school in Wisconsin having returned from a tour of duty in Iraq.

“I was living a Republican’s dream, not paying income tax and carrying a gun everywhere,” the West Point graduate said.

He was fighting in Iraq until he was decommissioned and sent back stateside despite asking to stay. When he got home to Naples he opened his own taxidermy shop.

Dorta was working on a pet prairie dog named Furball when I stopped by his shop. Most taxidermists won’t do pets because if anything goes wrong – or they fail to accurately capture Buster’s winning “personality” – they may not get paid, or at the very least will have one angry pet-mourner on their hands. Dorta is trying to break into the business and will take what comes his way.

He even offered to make me my own rump monkey. I had to turn the offer down, because that would’ve been like shooting a deer in the cage, no thrill of the hunt.

On the opposite side of town, veteran taxidermist Bucky Flowers, 54, has a thriving business working on gators, antelope and all sorts of exotic animals shipped back to his shop from Americans on African Safari – no pets for him.

Bucky also doesn’t have the time to mess around with fantasy either. It’s gator-hunting season and his staff is churning out six gators a week in addition to the rest of their work.

PW Qualls, whose tan and tough skin looks like it could withstand a gator attack, sounds a lot like Bubba from Forrest Gump as she carefully peels skin away from the semi-translucent pink flesh of a large gator in Bucky’s workshop.

“There’s gator chili, gator tacos, gator nuggets, gator jerky…”

Walking through Bucky’s shop is like a tour through an animal wax museum. There are panthers, leopards, boars, gators, foxes, rhinos and even an enormous African animal with horns called a kudu.

“I barely have enough time to handle the orders coming in from customers, much less sit around and start making up animals like the rump monkey,” Bucky said.

The rump monkey eluded me again, but I wasn’t worried. My rump monkey contact in Fort Myers was supposed to be back in town by now, so I called him the next day.

In the morning I was full of excitement, my hunt was coming to an end. I was sure my eyes would lie upon a rump monkey before the day was over. I made the call.

“Sorry, rump monkey is all packed up, I’m moving to Kentucky tomorrow,” I was told.

The receiver fell from my hand, and the excitement melted off my face. And that’s how my rump monkey escaped.