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NORTH BAY, Ont. — Eugen Klein has a beer in either hand. He plunks them on the table, plunks a plate piled with lamb chops between them, and starts eating.

One chop, two, then a third disappear into his mouth, which is bordered by a bushy moustache and painted, most often, by a broad smile from a bear of a man who loves to talk.

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“I am happy,” Eugen announces, in an Austrian accent betraying his Vancouver-by-way-of-Vienna roots. “I have a plate of chops. Now, go ahead, ask me anything you want to know about the fur business.”

What I want to know, what every fur buyer at Grannittis restaurant wants to know is: how much? How much will the top polar bear skin fetch at the following day’s wild fur auction at Fur Harvesters Auction house in North Bay, Ont., one of the few places, anywhere on the planet, where an interested party can shop for a Canadian polar bear pelt?

Eugen is a master taxidermist. He and Edith, his sweet-voiced, red rouge and lipstick-wearing wife of 54 years, own Capilano Furs & Taxidermy Studios in North Vancouver. They have been in business since 1956.