Category: Out on the Land

Faye and I got our hands on a bear pelt recently. We kind of inherited it. It’s a long story.

The easy part was skinning him.

Then we discovered the nightmare that is fleshing and tanning. First up, it’s gotta be done fast because:

• if he starts rotting his hair will fall out, also
• he’ll attract hungry beasts if you’re fleshing him outside, also
• he’ll stink up your house if you’re fleshing him inside (which, being afraid of beasts and the cold, I did)

Raw bear pelts are heavy. There’s a lot of fat on them. A lot of fat. A neighbour lent me his Ulu and I got to slicing.

You’ve gotta cut as close to the skin as possible, but not too close or you’ll cut through and get holes in your pelt.

Bears are not recommended as a first tanning project because they’re so damned fatty, and their skin is so thin and the fat permeates deep, deep into their skin.

Even after 20 hours of fleshing there was still heaps more fat constantly appearing out of the skin itself.

No matter how much work I did, it never seemed any closer to being done. I’d clear an area of fat and then the next time I took it out there’d be more fat there again. Tougher fat, closer to the skin, more tightly bound, even harder to cut away. Plus, I’d never done this before or even seen a completed bear hide, so I had no idea what I was doing, whether I was doing a good job, whether I’d fucked it up at the start and was just wasting my time, whether it was already good enough and I should just be done with it, or should give up and throw it away, no idea what all my efforts would achieve and whether it was even worth pursuing. I started having flash backs to the Ph.D.

Eventually I just decided enough was enough and bathed him in salt (to force out the water and stop any decomposition) and left him until the hardcore tanning chemicals I’d ordered online arrived.

To tan a fleshed hide, you need to first soak it in acid (pH around 2.0), then soak it in degreaser to get even more of that endless fat out, then soak it in super crazy harsh “will blind and kill you” chemicals (we used “PARA-TAN”, a complex of polymerized aluminum salts) that rip apart the collagen bonds in the skin and turn it into leather. Finally you apply an oil to it to make it dry all soft and nice.

When the pelt is drying after being tanned and oiled, you’re meant to stretch and work it a bunch to make it even nicer and softer. I was so done with him by this stage though that I didn’t bother, and he still came out pretty good.

I gotta admit, while I was working on him I was pessimistic. I thought I’d mess it up, all the hair would fall out, the hide would disolve, it’d come out hard as a brick, or who knows what else would go wrong. But even I was pretty pleased with the result.

Finally Faye did some finishing work on him, like cutting out his counter-intuitively hairless armpits, filling in some holes and cleaning up his edges.