Saturday 5 March 2011

How-to: break down and move a big, dead animal

I like hunting a long way from the road. This is especially true when I'm targeting species I don't have much experience with - I try and make up for my lack of expertise with, say, elk or moose, by trying to get to places that other people don't want to spend the time and effort getting to - if I can't outsmart the smart ones, then I'll spend the extra effort to get to the naive ones. So, this is a lot of fun, as it combines the twin adventures of hunting and getting into the backcountry. There's a problem, though; success at hunting means you've got a very large, very dead animal, and you're an awfully long way from your vehicle. Here's what I did this year:



Kill a moose. Try and get a small one, they're easier to move. At this point, I'm only 15km from the truck, but it's upstream, so that's not going to happen. Downstream is 65km of river before hitting the road again.



I use the gutless method for taking apart animals - I first used it on my elk on the Berland, and I was so impressed with how neat and straightforward it was, I've continued doing it. First step, cut through the hide along the belly and up the legs, and skin the upper half of the animal toward its back. It's pretty important at this stage to minimize the amount of hair you get on the meat - it just sticks to it, and it's a pain to remove later. Try to keep your hands clean and hair-free, as much as possible, having some rags/cloths/shop towels around helps. Also, skinning's a bit easier when there are bigger trees to tie the legs to; try to shoot your animal next to something a bit sturdier.



This next bit isn't one I have good photos of; my hands were kind of messy at this point. This involves taking the quarters, backstrap and other meat (neck, flank, brisket) off of the top side of the animal. It's all pretty easy. Start with the front quarter; have one person stand dorsally of the animal, and pull the leg up toward them, while the other cuts in underneath between the leg and the chest/ribs. Follow the natural muscle separation, and progressively free the leg and shoulder from the rest of the moose. This quarter comes off, and goes in a game bag on a tarp. You brought both of these things with you. Next is the hind quarter, which works the same way (but is heavier, and involves a bit more cutting through muscle). Work your way up from the belly side with a knife, while the other person pulls the leg up and away from the belly. You'll reach the pelvis, skim the knife along the bones of the pelvis, staying close to the bone. You'll reach the ball-joint, cut around that and it pops out easily. Continue cutting upward until the hind quarter is free. It's easier than it sounds. Bag the hind quarter, then remove the backstrap, brisket and neck meat. The neck meat's probably the hardest part, but there's no real reason it needs to come off as one piece. Now you're left with an animal with no skin and no meat (except the ribs, we'll get them later) on the top side. Stretch the skin from the top side out above the back of the animal, and roll the animal over onto the outstretched skin.



Now that it's rolled over, skin the other side, working from belly to back. Once that's done, repeat the same procedure, removing the quarters, backstrap and neck and brisket. Once that's done, you can get into the body cavity and remove the tenderloins. By waiting until almost all of the meat is dealt with and packed away before opening the gut cavity, the whole process stays really clean. Once the tenderloins are out, you can remove the ribs; a hatchet works well, a Leatherman saw works very poorly.



When all's said and done, you should be left with two things: clean game bags full of tasty meat (pictured is about half of the total), and a pile of bones, guts and legs. It's pretty satisfying to look at what's left behind, knowing you've picked things clean. I did leave behind the heart (nothing much left of it), the kidneys (not recommended, as they can have high levels of metals), and the liver (I've never liked it, and it deteriorates quickly in bull moose during rut).



So, you've got bags of meat, and you're likely too tired to paddle to the road that day. At this point, my two biggest concerns were a) cooling the meat down quickly and keeping it dry, and b) larger carnivores than me taking my hard-won moose away. The solution to a) was to put together a rack out of driftwood to get the meat up off the ground, and make a tarp roof to keep off possible rain (though it didn't rain). The solution to b) was to spend the rest of the afternoon gathering a huge pile of driftwood, and using it to keep a fuck-off big bonfire going all night next to the meat, which my hunting partner and I took shifts feeding. Both solutions worked.



The next morning, pack your game bags in your canoe, and paddle on home. We built a small frame of driftwood in the bottom of the canoe to keep the bags out of the water, and were pretty conscientious about bailing, to keep things dry. A small moose takes up about this much of a canoe - pack accordingly.

To come (though not really, as I don't have photos), how to spend four days cutting up a moose....

4 comments:

  1. How long did this take? And do you hang the meat at all?

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  2. I shot the moose at 10:00, and we had it apart and in bags by 2:00 or so. Getting it to the river took a bit longer - we carried it ~200m to a river backchannel, paddled and dragged it ~500m to the closest point to the main river, and then portaged it ~100m to the edge of the river, where we set up camp. We stayed there that night, then paddled out the next day, which ended up being 11 hours on the river (it was a rather technical paddle with a very heavy canoe), and then another 10 hours or so of messing around unpacking, hitching a ride, ferrying gear, etc., before we were back in Whitehorse.

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  3. As for hanging, I put up some beams in my garden shed, and hung everything in there. Snow fell the day we returned, so I harvested about half of my backyard's worth of snow and packed it into a 45gal drum, which I put in the shed to keep the temperature low. It hovered around 4C until about day 6, when it climbed to 10C, and I started cutting. The small stuff (neck, flank, etc) that went into stew and ground I dealt with after 3-4 days, the backstraps and ribs I cut on day 4, and the quarters hung for 6-9 days. I'm really happy with the results - I was a bit worried about the quarters spoiling when it got to 10C, but they were massive enough that they stayed cool as the temperature rose.

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  4. looks like this was quite fun. and fruitful.

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