Skinning

I haven't been able to skin anything since the fox.  The weather has been horribly cold, dipping down below -40 at its lowest.  I was going pretty stir crazy for a while.  Even laid down on the kitchen floor and had a good scream.  Of course the floor was cold though, so I had to get my butt up and put my big girl pants on and deal with the suffocation of being trapped inside.  So needless to say the critters weren't moving around too much during the freezing ass weather.  Then one day it was only -20 and mom got the car started.  She had a bunch of errands to run and the light was awful that day so I offered to chauffeur her around.  I should have said you can drive yourself (and she was willing to) and gone to check traps with Gregg.  The one day that I decide to be a good, helpful kid and Gregg finds a lynx in a foot trap!  Here's the critter.

The stupid lynx that had to get caught when I was running around with mom.

Well since I couldn't be there on the trap line, I definitely wasn't missing the skinning.  I'd seen Gregg skin a paw once before but not a whole lynx. Gregg waited till after dinner to start skinning so I could take a look at the whole kitty.  I thought skinning a lynx would be very similar to a fox, but it wasn't quite as similar as I imagined.  You start at the pads of the feet and work the back legs the same as a fox.

Starting from the back legs working towards the head.

The lynx certainly had a lot more muscle than the foxes.  Gregg pulled a little on the lynx when skinning but not nearly as much as on a fox.  He skinned it more, I guess the lynx hide is a bit tougher than a foxes. You can see the cut marks in the meat in the picture above from skinning as opposed to just pulling the hide down.  Gregg starts with the back legs, skins to the butt and a little ways down, does the front legs and cuts the legs off at the wrist to finish the paws later (front and back), skins to the head and then goes back and skins the ears and paws.  Gregg is so fast at skinning and makes it look easy.  I felt like I was fumbling around when I skinned the fox.  We recently caught two lynx, and I was going to try to skin one but they stayed frozen for a long time and I was busy catching 7 fish and 11 ptarmigan.

*snicker*

Okay so I'm juvenile.  But at least I'm smiling and laughing and amused.

Skinning a paw

Gregg uses a razor to skin the paw after skinning the rest of the big old cat.  He hangs them by the wrist and the weight of the hide helps in skinning the long creepy fingers.  After skinning the paws (the back looked slightly easier than the front), he skins the ears and around the nose a little.  The whole kitty gets scraped and then stretched.

Skinning the right ear

I think this last picture is my favorite.  The hide is such a brilliant red from blood, which is a little disturbing, but the ear is so perfectly inside out.  When Gregg was skinning the head he nicked a vein or an artery and this steady stream of blood dripped everywhere and smeared all over the hide when it was wiped up.  A little gruesome but neat all the same.

Inside out ear