Dogs and Pedagogues

 

In the skinning of a deer, there is no need to take the cape with the hide. The cape refers to the skin and fur of the head and neck. In fowl and poultry, it refers to the shoulder feathers. For big bucks, memorable bucks of remarkable heft or antler mass which are to be mounted and hung on the wall as a trophy or sign of accomplishment or virility, the cape is indeed necessary, with the antlers, obviously, and in this case the rest of the hide is not taken. In the case of a bear rug the cape may be taken to great effect, and in the case of furbearers the cape is taken, too. Everything from the nose and lips to the tail and anus is pulled or cut off the carcass and this fresh hide is called a green pelt.

I was just scraping the fatty deposits off the inside of the black anus of a hide from a doe shot last fall, a hide which I’m tanning as a deer-fur rug.

Immediately upon skinning the deer we laid the hide out fur down, and the flesh side had tallow and sinew and flat muscle that had pulled off the body during the skinning, now we took salt – table salt or canning and pickling salt or kosher salt – about three pounds depending on the heft of the deer (more accurately the hide) – and rub it into the damp fleshy side of the hide.

 

The moment one’s heart stops beating, bacteria that has lived in symbiosis with one’s body begins to break down and decompose the body. Given some short amount of time, the bacteria will work on the skin, and the hair or fur begins to fall out; this is called slippage, as in “the hair is slipping out of its follicles.” The salting of the hide retards decomposition and slipping. Too, salt helps to bind the fur to the skin by swelling and puckering the skin. The salt also helps to draw out the water in the skin and fat and flesh.

We folded up the salted hide (fur out) and placed it on a shelf out in the woodshed. That was about December the first.

And then we forgot about it.

Until about mid-winter, when I checked on it.

The birds or mice or squirrels had taken away a few hairs and nibbled on some salt, but otherwise it was fine. Sort of frozen, but not fully frozen due to the salting.

I pulled it open and shook out the salt and applied another few pounds of fresh salt. Then folded it back up (fur side out) and put it back on the shelf in the shed.

Now it’s May first, and it is warm enough to work well outside, and I have a few dozen gallons of rainwater and snowmelt (necessary for various steps of the long tanning process), and the hide is fully thawed and ready to be fleshed.

On a cantilevered, shaped 2 x 6 beam I lay out the hide and use a two-handed flashing tool to scrape off all the flash and fat and sinew that I can (very hard work – think of a gristly piece of meat and trying to separate gristle from gristle). There are two bullet holes in the hide, and there I flesh carefully so as not to rip the holes further open. The fat of the anus is difficult to scrape off. Here and there I accidentally rip holes in the skin – I can repair any holes later.

The tail I cut off and set-aside; the vertebrae in the tail of a deer are very small, very narrow and thin. This is “bucktail” from a doe, the hairs of which have been used for centuries to make fishing jigs or to tie fishing flies. The tallow that I generate in the fleshing process goes into the suet feeders. The birds don’t like it much. The flesh and sinew I burn and in burning it smells like a barbecue at a wake.

Next, I soak the hide in a salt bath of three pounds of salt and ten gallons of water for a couple of days to make sure the salt penetrates fully. Then I’ll flesh it again; it gets easier with each fleshing.

Then I soak it two or three days in a Borax bath (ten ounces of Borax for ten gallons of water) and flesh again.

Then comes the brine bath (vinegar and salt) that will kill any and all remaining bacteria, further preserving the hide. If I stop the process at this point and let the hide dry, we’d call it “rawhide” – untanned, non-leather hide (with the fur still on in this case).

The tanning solution is chemical, and basically converts the hide from something organic to something originally organic, now of a different sort.

Following that one lets the leathered hide dry, while stretching it regularly since it shrinks as it dries. Soften the hide by stretching it, pulling it this way and that, and by adding Neat’s foot oil to it and maybe going over the skin with a palm sander to thin it.

I’m an explainer by nature, a teacher by blood. Some people smile when I start explaining, when I go into teaching mode. I’m idiosyncratic in my words, and odd in my method. My passions for both subjects and the teaching of them – or my breath – can startle some people

I used to get confused between pedagogic and pedantic. I think I’ve got a general understanding now. But not a precise understanding. I’ll let you go to the dictionary if you have to. I go to the dictionary every day; I have a digital one now on my phone, the Merriam-Webster.

Hamlet’s Polonius was supposedly pedantic. Anyway, that’s what I was taught. I never could understand the Bard. And I never trusted the teachers. Daniel Webster and John Dewey were pedagogic. Or was it Adlai Stevenson?

It doesn’t matter much, the difference, because I’m both. So, I guess this column wasn’t all about the preparation for and tanning of a deer hide. Rather, I was just documenting a case in point for posterity my pedantic pedagogy. Dogs and pedagogues, that’s us.