November 23rd, 2007

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Saints Preserve Us, or at least somebody had better, because Carl sure didn't know what he was doing. At least that's what I assume the expanded topic of this article would have been, given its subject and outcome. To back up a few steps, there's a fantastic group of community run websites collectively known as Freecycle through which people can give away things that are in good condition but for which they no longer have any use. It's kind of like Craigslist but for free.

So what's up in that big, wet, heavy black garbage bag sitting on my garage floor? Well, let me back up another step and say that if you don't like pictures of the insides of animals you may want to skip this article.

 

 

A Freecycler was giving away a deer pelt. A raw, roughly cleaned deer pelt. I thought what the heck, I'll throw in a request and see if I can get it. It turns out the owner was going to give it to another person but they backed out. Finally I was able to go out and get it! So there we have it up there. It was heavy, and I'll admit it, kind of gross.

Now, I grew up in the forest but that's a far stretch from growing up inside a damn deer. Before I got the stripped skin I did a lot of reading on the interwebs so I roughly knew what I was supposed to do with it. I also knew I was only going to be able to roughly approximate what was considered the "right" equipment.

MOOD: RAMBO

All in all it had been off of the deer and sitting in a poorly tied black garbage bag in the hot weather for at least five days before it got to me.

 

 

This turned out to be a very bad thing.

My first job was to orient myself with what on earth I was looking at. I don't know at what stage one would begin this stripping and preserving job, but there seemed to be a lot of meat and fat still on the skin. Especially around - and I'll use the scientific term here - around the bunghole.

The grossest part, probably, is that some of the edges had already turned rancid. Because it had gone from the hunter to his girlfriend to give away, and then because of the dink who welshed on the deal, the pelt had sat out in the heat for nearly a week before I got a chance to start preserving it. Now to be fair, I don't know what I'm doing...but I know that if I had gotten it steaming and bloody off the ass of the beast the same day it got blown away its pelt would've turned out a heck of a lot better.

 

 

I had to wash the whole pelt off because of dirt and other...ehhh...contaminations. Of the crawling kind. You could make a very good case at this point that I should've rolled it back up and thrown it into the garbage. But I washed it thoroughly and cut off any area that was disgusting. It wasn't too bad.

MOOD: M.A.S.H.

 

 

The bullet wound was evident, blown clear through the front shoulder of the thing, and a fairly large one too. So being the not-remotely competent CSI-guy or hunter, it looks like the guy who took it down was both a good shot but using a ridiculously large gun with probably a huge scope, so...maybe not so impressive. I don't know. It's got two huge holes in it...I don't know what that does to its worth, and to that point I don't know how you're supposed to get a deer pelt without holes in it...

So I went about spending several hours doing my best with my worst knives (not used for food) to strip off the bits of the meat that was left and pull off the strings and chunks of fat. The connective tissue was incredibly tough. According to senor internet they do it with dull hacksaw blades bent over large PVC pipes or logs. I had dull flexible knives and a wrench bent over, er, a board. It was not easy or fun. It was incredibly gross and the fact that the pelt was bloody and fading fast added to my frustration. I wondered how different a fresh one would be or if I was just incompetent.

The smell...oh, the smell was truly awful.

MOOD: EARL WARREN

 

 

After many hours spread over two days I was ready to salt it. I didn't have the capabilities to tan the hide once it was salted, so I was going to settle for simply preserving it. Maybe I can tan it later? I think I can go back and do that. I don't know. Anyway, I bought a ton of salt. I'm still a little up in the air as to whether or not I got the right kind of salt. I'm pretty sure I got non-iodized. Apparently iodized salt makes deer pelts burst into unholy flames and sing songs backwards. So, yeah, I had to make sure to get non-iodized. And lots of it.

The deer pelt was unfortunately soaking wet, a product of me absolutely having to hose it down because it was so darn gross and infested. So I used a lot of salt and also put it up on a couple of spare screen windows I had laying around to try and encourage air flow all around it.

After the second day I did a salt change, which amounts to brushing off all of that damp salt and putting on new salt. At that point in time I hooked up a fan to encourage additional air flow. It felt like it was taking forever for the moisture to be drawn out. I doubted I was doing anything right. I felt badly about wasting the deer pelt and I was frustrated and sure it was just going to rot into putrescence.

 

 

During the salt-drying phase I was able to build a fire in my back yard in my freshly-dug fire pit. I was getting rid of some yard debris the previous owner was kind enough to leave, so I tucked the grocery bag FULL of deer hide scraps into the fire once it was raging hot. It popped and sizzled and I tried to avoid the fire for a while because the stench of rancid pelt meat was still in my nostrils.

 

 

Finally though the deer was dry. It did turn out okay. It's not good by any stretch of the imagination. It had been wet too long and sat out too long before I got to it, so there's a small area where some of the hair had fallen out. There's the pair of gigantic bullet holes. It's significantly smaller than it should have been since I had to trim off several inches from, well, basically around the hole thing due to rot - and a few inches at the bottom because I just couldn't competently get off enough of that fat and I was working against time.

It's very, very stiff - in the above picture it's hanging up only by the stiffness of the curved over top parts balanced on my workbench. I've read that you can tumble the pelt in a sort of drum thing to soften it up, but I'm afraid that doing that would dislodge a lot of the hairs. I'm not sure. The rest of the hair seems to be fairly secure. But I also lack the facilities to set up that sort of a tumbling contraption. The hairs also have trapped a lot of errant salt in them.

And it still has a slight odor to it. I don't know if it's ever going to go away. I think it's as dry as I can get it with salt. I don't know if the odor means it's still rotting, just slower. I don't know what it means. But it's never coming up into the main house; it's relegated to the garage.

MOOD: HOMER SIMPSON IN A DRESS

I did a really crappy job with it. I feel badly for it, knowing that if I had been able to get it sooner it would've turned out much better. I'm glad I had the experience, for sure. I just wish I had been able to turn it into something cooler.

But hey, what's that?

 

 

A good friend just dropped off several pounds of ground venison sausage (and a couple steaks) and asked if I wanted the horns. Oh heck yeah! They're not very big but that's probably good...I wouldn't want to screw up a huge rack. Now what should I do with them?

The End
 

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