Critter Camp Out

It's such a nice head, a raccoon head, meticulously sculpted from Styrofoam, beaming a permanent cartoon smile. Its owner is a mulleted man from Fayetteville, Arkansas, who goes by the name March Hare. He took twelve hours to make it, working in four-hour shifts. It'll be upholstered in faux fur to match a full-length suit complete with fidgety claws and a black-ringed tail. Worth nearly $1,000, it'll be worn on special occasions, such as this camp out at a dusty KOA one hour west of St. Louis.

Steven Fredrickson gazes at the head longingly, absently tickling his chin with his fingers. He hails from Kansas City, and friends here know him as Nikon, the raccoon. "I want to try and get a fur suit," Nikon says to the man holding the head. "But mine is going to be rubber or prosthetic. I just overheat too easy."

Because of this overheating problem, he plans to get a "partial" -- fuzzy arm, leg and head coverings that tuck into shirts and pants to make a grown man look like an upright-walking animal in human clothes. Nikon hopes the suit will bring him a step closer to his dream. "People say it's the closest thing to transformation," he explains. Deep down, this 24-year-old man longs to be a talking raccoon.

It's the first night of the Howl, Growl and Purr, an annual camp out in Stanton, Missouri, for Midwestern members of the "Furry Fandom," an international consortium of people with a unique fondness for animals. The sky shows signs of rain. Nikon is dressed frumpily in shorts, sandals and a San Diego Padres hat. His T-shirt displays a buxom female raccoon with long, flowing hair -- the logo of a larger furry gathering: Chicago's Midwest FurFest. This small Missouri gathering has drawn furries, which members of the Fandom call themselves, from as far away as Memphis and Oklahoma City. Nikon's been planning this trip since February, when he put in for time off from the photo counter at an Eckerd drug store in Johnson County.

He's lingering at the edge of a crowd that's gathered on the porch of a KOA Kozy Kabin, looking for an opening in the free-roaming conversation. Dusk turns deep blue. A fellow near Nikon sports a pair of puppy ears jutting from a ball cap and a bushy tail that dangles over the porch rail he's leaning against. The deck's white Christmas lights are a decorative touch, courtesy of Tyger Cowboy, the organizer of this event. His real name is Christopher Roth, and he's a travel agent from St. Louis. Among furs worldwide, Tyger is an institution. He recently formed UniFURsal, an international fellowship built on the principal of unity in the Furry Fandom.

Tyger holds court from the center of the porch, tagging a punch line to each tidbit of conversation and flashing a human smile so solid it seems that it too is carved from Styrofoam. Nikon watches Tyger from the fringe, rubbing his hands together. His admiration is obvious. He seems deep in thought, searching for something witty to say, something that will make Tyger laugh.

"The BBC was going to come, but they couldn't make it," Tyger announces grandly. "But they want to pay for us to have another camp out this summer so they can cover it."

"Are you sure we want to do that?" a fur asks warily. Vanity Fair recently published a long article about the Fandom that zeroed in on Fox Wolfie Galen, a 39-year-old man who lives among thousands of stuffed animals in Pennsylvania. The reporter gained access to Galen's lair and discovered fuzzy toys with small slits between their little legs. "I look at his eyes, and I'm thinking, 'Oh, it's alive,'" Galen said of a stuffed raccoon he often has intercourse with. The article horrified Midwestern furs who'd granted interviews during the Chicago FurFest. They felt it did little to distinguish them from Galen, who represents a very small percentage of the Fandom. Nikon felt particularly burned; photographs he took ran with the article that hurt so many of his friends.

It's a sometimes contentious consortium, the Fandom, what with the devotees' divergent interests. Some are "fur-suiters," people who dress as mascots for public and private activities. Other furries, like Nikon, long to be transformed into humanized animals. Some in the Fandom explore more deviant interests: "Plushophiles" have sex with stuffed animals, and the "zoophiles" have sex with live animals. Most simply have sex with one another or with themselves, or they are merely nerds who love role-playing games, spend hours chatting on the Internet and occasionally download dirty pictures, albeit ones featuring human-animal hybrids. Skinny or fat, introverted or oddly melodramatic, they were the kids everyone picked on, the ones who found solace in fantasy books. The Fandom may be the first place they've felt welcome, yet they still fight: One group launched the scathing Web site burnedfur.com, calling for excommunication of the fetishists. Tyger's UniFURsal provides an oasis. Its motto is compassionate: "Offering our paws, hooves and claws in friendship."

Nikon doesn't visit Tyger as often as he'd like, certainly not as often as his other furry friends in Kansas City do. Only a dozen or so furs live in the metro area, and their efforts to meet regularly are hampered by pitiful consensus-building skills. So St. Louis is the place to go. On any given weekend, Tyger will open his home to furs from all around the Midwest. On a typical Saturday they'll follow him to the zoo to see his "furry community outreach" efforts (he dresses as a silly-faced tiger and hugs kids), then to Chris' Pancake and Dining for a formal dinner in tails and ears, then to a late night of full-fur-suit bowling. And there's always space to crash on the couch.