deerskin to buckskin, part 1: fleshing

**before you proceed, please be aware that you may find pictures & details below to be a bit gruesome. just so you know, it was actually a very pleasant experience**

so, brooke has some very very awesome friends who are involved in awesome ventures such as The P.I.N.E. Project, Sticks & Stones Wilderness School, Earth Tracks and The Art of Mentoring.  i never thought of developing my wilderness skills until i was introduced to these people and now here we are, tanning a deer hide in our backyard.

in January, brooke & i went for a stroll along Duffins Creek and saw a crowd of tracks along the frozen waterbed. obviously we climbed down the bank to check them out. along the way we got distracted by some blood and fur in the snow and ended up starting an investigation that involved kicking the snow a bit with our feet, to see if it was coming from something buried underneath. this continued for about 5 minutes until we reached the grass and found nothing. confused, brooke looked up and spotted, oh, about ten feet away, a MASSIVE deer carcass that somehow we had overlooked. could've happened to anyone.

it was a pretty fresh kill and we felt like we were being watched by a few wary animals as we checked it out. part of the hide had been pretty cleanly removed in one big piece and we debated for only a moment whether or not take it. we carried it by the scruff of what once was a neck out of the woods and back to our car, passing a family on the way who didn't even stare. strange.

anyways, this hide has been wrapped in two garbage bags in our chest freezer since we picked it up and we designated this week for the tanning! we have Deerskins Into Buckskins and some necessary tools courtesy of andrew & carly and last night we did the first step in the process - fleshing. this involved draping the hide over a beam made of plumber's pipe resting on our green bin (!) and pinned under a bench in the yard. then we  scraped the fat & flesh off using a tool called...a scraper. doing this at night wasn't ideal but we're on a schedule since it has to "buck" in an alkaline solution for ~3 days, to get rid of the protective mucus layer out of the hide so that oils (during the dressing stage) will be able to penetrate it.

brooke, making it happen

it's pretty physical work 

perhaps too excited about removing a big piece

i didn't know anything about natural tanning until yesterday but i've learned a few things from matt richards' sweet book. first off, it's the way the hide is tanned not that it is made from deer that makes it a "buckskin". i'll spare you all the details but basically what you are doing in the dressing stage is trying to coat each fibre in a layer of the skin with a fat, often from brain or, likely in our case, eggs, so that it becomes soft and flexible. to preserve the hide in this state, you "impregnate" it with wood smoke which coats the fibers with water resistant resins and changes the chemical structure so that the soft state of the buckskin is maintained.

richards really gets you at the beginning of the book with this sweet little factoid:

"Have you ever told a friend, "uh, that cost me a couple of bucks". Well that's because buckskin was such a common commodity of exchange in the American colonies that after the Revolution, buck became the slang for a dollar bill." NEAT!

stay tuned for more adventures in tanning. i'm going to get ryan to show me how to set up a time lapse while we're working...this should be interesting.