Lots of Buckskins and a Food Fight

This past class was the day for animal connection. We had big plans for Wednesday evening involving forty freshly-caught Dungeness crabs, courtesy of our resident fisherman, so we arrived by car to carry all our supplies.

Tuesday night we gathered in the yurt to share stories of the week, and heard some tales of the many felines that had come to feed on a nearby deer carcass. After the stories we returned to our camp, rekindled the fire, and discussed the next day’s activities. Though RDNA was skipping their usual bird sit, Native Eyes decided to have one anyway, and to investigate the deer carcass.

Tuesday morning’s bird sit was once again dominated by accipiter signatures. I have to admit that I’m getting somewhat impatient with these avian predators, and I’d really like to see some other bird patterns.

We gathered in Tent City next to the garden gate to poke around the kill site, and though the carcass was supposedly only two weeks old, little enough was left. Skin was a leathery tent over rough-gnawed bones, but maggots still squirmed in the dark places. It was a small deer, probably a yearling, with the bones mostly intact through gnawed at some of the ends. The ribcage was whole, but the limbs were disembodied and strewn widely. The ears had been removed and were lying lonely in the leafmold. Clipped fur was everywhere. Some speculation had been that this was a cougar kill, but I’m reluctant to draw that conclusion, as the bones were whole and the site so exposed. My opinion leans toward a smaller feline.

After the investigation we gathered again in the yurt for an unanticipated fashion show starring the Buckskin Brothers (Jay, Matt, and Ned), kicking off our animal-intensive day.



I became an annoying shutterbug for this class, and as a result I’ve got a pretty complete photographic hide tanning class for this blog. So what follows is my parroting of Jay Sliwa’s, Matt Berry’s, and Ned Conwell’s lesson in wet-scrape braintanned buckskin, based on this book:



First, skin the animal. The Buckskin Brothers said they prefer to do this while hanging it by the neck. Start by cutting up the midline of the belly from the anus to the throat, being careful not to puncture the gut cavity or it’ll get really really messy. Then cut across the body from ankle to ankle, forelimb across to forelimb and hindlimb across to hindlimb. Here’s a little photo of the cuts sketched out. Please note that it is not in fact a drawing of an alien.



Then set your knife down (well out of reach lest you be tempted to pick it up again) and use your hands to work the hide free. Knife nicks, even small shallow ones, will become a weak spot and then a hole over the course of the tanning process, so don’t give yourself the opportunity to make that mistake.

Then flesh the hide. Use a stout beam supported so that it stands up at an angle, like so:



Place the hide fur-side down, draped over the end of the beam. Lean against the butt of your beam to hold the skin in place as you scrape away from you down the beam. Begin scraping with a flat, dull impliment. Don’t worry about scraping too much. As long as you use something dull, rather than a knife, you shouldn’t damage the hide. The goal here is to remove the meat, fat, membrane, blood vessels, and such that still adhere to the hide after skinning.



Then, soak the hide in an alkaline solution, a process also known as bucking. This phase is what gives buckskin it’s name, not the sex of the deer killed for the hide. Buckskin can, in fact, be made from doe skins too. You can use either wood ashes or lye to make the alkaline solution, and unfortunately I don’t remember the proportion of lye to water. For wood ashes, you use the floating-egg-test: If a fresh egg sinks, you’ve got too little wood ash. If it floats on it’s side, you’ve got too much. If it floats end-up, with a circle about the size of a quarter poking out of the water, you’ve got the balance right.

I didn’t catch the length of time necessary for bucking, but braintan.com says that the soaking continues until the hair at the neck is easily pulled out.



After bucking you’re ready to scrape. Take the skin back to your fleshing beam, this time placing it hair-side-up, and again leaning on it to hold it in place. Begin scraping off the fur with your dull fleshing implement, starting near the rump where it’s easier. You’ll notice that a layer of the skin tends to scrape off with the hair – that’s what you’re going for, anyway. The fleshing took off the innermost layer of skin, the loose fibers, membrane and blood vessels and such, and the scraping will take off the outermost epidermis and grain layer of skin. You’ll be left with the middle fiber layer, the part that will become the finished buckskin.



Skin has multiple layers. Tanners identify (more or less) four layers. The epidermis and grain layers are the outer two where the hair is anchored. These two layers consist of loose fibers held in a mucous matrix. The third layer down is the fiber layer, a strong, interconnected matrix of fibers. The bottom is a thin layer of loose fiber. You want the strong fiber matrix for your hide, not the mucous matrix. Scrape it all off!



You may also notice that the epidermis and grain layers have become somewhat blue-gray, translucent and very slimy from the bucking. I used that difference in appearance and texture to know when I’d finished scraping an area, since often the fur comes off more easily than the grain. The underlying fiber layer is cream colored and more opaque, sticky-rubbery rather than snotty-slimy. Once again, scrape away – you won’t damage the hide with too much scraping, as long as your implement is dull.

Once your hide is cleaned of fur and grain, rinse it with fresh water. Now it’s time to wring it out. Here’s a fun method taught by Jay Sliwa:



Hang up the hide, with just the very end flopped over a pole to keep it in place.

Take the dangling end and loop it over your pole.

Roll in the edges of the hide, so that you have a wet hide donut hanging from your pole. Insert a strong stick into the donut hole.









Begin twisting and wringing out your hide.



Twist till it seems you can’t twist anymore.



Get a friend to help if you need to, or if you just want to have more fun with it. Twist it up some more. Blot with a towel.



Untwist, and twist it up again in the oposite direction. Once you’ve gotten as much water out of the hide as you can possibly get it'll look white and opaque, rather than translucent. Then stretch it out again.



And now it’s time for the brains. According to the Buckskin Brothers, every animal has enough brains to tan it’s own hide, but if you don’t have the brain from your animal you can use pig brains sold in butcher shops instead. I’ve also heard of using egg yolk. In any case, what you're looking for is an emulsified oil, one that will stay in solution and penetrate the skin rather than separating out and floating to the top. Brain is, according to many, the best for the job.



Make a brain shake by blending (or squishing by hand, yum) the brains and warm water. No one seems to have a solid proportion of brains to water online, though I probably have this info in my notes (when I find them I’ll know). Since animals have enough brain to tan their own hides, take more or less as much brain as would be present in the living animal and mix it with enough warm water to make a thin gooshy milkshake consistency.

Make sure it’s well squooshed and without lumps, and mix it with enough water to cover your hide.



Then put the hide in a bucket with the brain water and let it sit. According to the Buckskin Brothers, it only needs to sit for about 20 minutes, but longer is OK.



After braining, it’s time to work the hide dry. This is probably the most energy-intensive step of the whole process. Working the hide until it’s completely dry will help keep it from stiffening up. Apparently, one of the most common issues for beginning tanners is that their hides turn stiff after braining, a problem that crops up when you let a wet or damp hide sit without being worked. A possible solution is to rebrain the hide and work it dry again. So choose a sunny, dry day, or sit by a fire, and work that hide until it feels completely dry.



A vertical cable stretched from a tree limb to the trunk, or from an overhead beam to the floor, helps. Stretch the skin against the cable, formerly-furry-side out, so that the innermost side of the skin touches the cable. Work it back and forth, pulling on either end so that the whole hide slides over the cable with each tug.

The final step, smoking, is not strictly necessary and indeed fancy white buckskins are not smoked. However, if these white buckskins get wet they will revert to the cardboard-like state that all that work over the cable was intended to avert. So smoking waterproofs the hide, while creosote and other resinous substances in the smoke help to preserve it.



For our class, Jay put together a sweet smoking setup. He dug a U-shaped hole, rocket-stove-style. He attached a roughly 3 foot length of stovepipe to one branch of the U, and put a pot lid over the other. We had a fire going close by to furnish coals, and a bag of punky brown-rotted wood to toss on the coals to make smoke.

Jay attached a canvas skirt to the top of the stovepipe. Then he took two otherwise finished but unsmoked hides and glued the edges together with Elmer’s glue to form a bag, and attached the neck portions of the hides to the canvas skirt, then hung from a treebranch. Here’s the finished setup:



Jay then took coals from the fire, dumped them down the hole under the pot lid, and tossed in some punky wood after. Smoke began leaking through holes in the glued edges of the hides, permeating the area with a sweet, sharp scent. After a few hours Jay turned the hide bag inside out to smoke the other side, revealing beautifully tanned buckskins:



That evening Native Eyes organized a crab feed for the 40 students and staff of RDI, with fresh crab caught off the Bolinas coast by our very own Native Eyes fisherman, along with copious salad and a ridiculous amount of dumpstered bread and pastries.





It was exhausting and chaotic and glorious. Anything that ends in a spontaneous lemon-wedge fight is worth the time and effort.