(pictures taken on 10/23/06 on 2006_Montana_Hunting)
Chip shot a deer on 10/23/06 at Custer National Forest Montana and I took a few pictures as he skinned it. Below is an explanation of the process. For comparison, you might also check out Field Dressing an Elk.
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Below is Chip with his deer. Immediately after Chip shot the deer, he cut its throat to bleed it as much as possible as early as possible (only useful in the first 5 minutes). Chip then field dressed it, which means he cut open the belly and pulled out the organs. This is to get the deer to cool off as soon as possible to prevent the meat from spoiling. The next step was to get the deer back to camp.
Here is the deer back at camp, about 9pm on 10/23/06, and Chip wants to finish skinning the deer right away for a few reasons. Mainly it is easier to skin the deer before the deer freezes solid (which will happen tonight in the cold weather and snow). Normally we would hang the deer by its rear legs up in the air, but there was no place to hang the deer in camp, so Chip is doing this on a tarp on the ground. In the picture below, you see he has skinned half the deer, we then flip the deer over and finish skinning the other half.
Just after flipping the deer over, he starts at the leg by splitting the hide, then slices with the knife while pulling the hide taught and away from the deer carcass.
After getting the hide off, Chip cuts the head of the deer all the way off (twisting the deer head by the antlers can be helpful).
The deer hide is salted and then rolled up. It will keep this way for the two weeks until we get the hide to the tanner. The first step is to lay the hide out flat, and pour salt on it which Chip does in the picture below.
Chip spreads the salt with his hands and gets a relatively even coat (this only takes a minute or two).
Chip washes out the deer's organ cavity with a rag and water. He is mainly trying to get any hair off the carcass before it freezes tonight, and get the carcass as clean as he can. The final step is to pour several buckets of water over the deer carcass to rinse it off.
The deer tenderloins are found on the inside of the deer body cavity (Chip is holding one in the picture below). We cut those out to have for dinner in camp, they are considered one of the very very best cuts of meat.
Here Steve on the left and Chip on the right are putting the skinned deer carcass in "game bags". This is to keep dirt and flies off of the meat while it hangs.
We didn't have any great place to hang the deer, so we improvised hanging it against the pickup truck. The deer then froze solid in the very low temperatures here in the next few hours, and then the next morning we took it to a wild game butcher's shop. This is a place that cleans and butchers the meat into meal-sized packages, wraps it in butcher's paper, and freezes it.
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