Illustration by Gretchen Legler

How to Tan a Beaver Hide

  1. In the springtime, beaver civilisation demands that ii-year-old male person kits leave their family lodges. And for a time, they become refugees. Crossing our roads, they are too oftentimes striking by cars and pickup trucks. Often, it's just an blow, just I've heard that some drivers aim for them (or racoons, or porcupine, or muskrats, or turtles). Who would run over an beast on purpose?
  2. When you lot run into a beaver on the road, pull over and turn on your hazard lights. If the beaver is live, hurry him along. If he is fatally injured, merely not dead, you might recollect virtually a manner to shorten his misery with a swift expiry. If this is beyond you, consider moving the animal off the road to a grassy wet place where he might dice with earth under his head.
  3. If the beaver is expressionless and you think that something good could come of this carnage, lift him up past his apartment, scaled tail and lower him into the torso of your auto. Your car will smell like fish and blood and wet fur as you bulldoze home—a gift.
  4. Information technology volition non be easy to separate the beaver'due south thick russet fur from his body. Beginning by making circle cuts around the legs. Piece through the skin of the belly from head to the tail. Now carefully pull the hide abroad from the brute's cleaved body. Notice the backbone, skull, and formidable teeth. The ears. Eyelashes. Whiskers. Easily and feet. Come across how muscles adhere to os, how cartilage and tendon demark them. This may remind yous of your own trunk.
  5. Once you accept undressed the beaver, you might wonder what to do with his mankind. Some people exercise swallow beaver, of course, but you may want to render the body to a place its spirit finds familiar: the edge of h2o. If you go out it there among the leap grass, it will non be wasted. A fox may find it and exist grateful. She may have kits on the style, and the food volition brand her strong.
  6. You will demand a fleshing board and knife or a direct razor, or an old-fashioned drawknife. You may discover these hand tools at antiquarian stores—where pieces of useful technology related to one-time means often prevarication in dusty bins, curiosities to our modern sensibilities. Scrape all the mankind and fat from the beaver'due south hibernate. Be gentle around the tender ears and where black eyes once peered out.
  7. As you piece of work the hide, you may recollect some of what you lot know about beavers, how they are a keystone species. With their dams and lodges, they create wetlands that support entire ecosystems. One biologist has chosen the beaver nature'due south greatest souvenir to humankind.
  8. Later on fleshing comes tanning. At that place are many ways to tan an animal hide. Pick one that feels best for you.
  9. In one case the pelt is tanned, stake information technology out to dry. Y'all might nail it to a flat board, or lace it onto a willow hoop. Once dry, you may begin to soften it. Scrape information technology lightly with a pocketknife, or whorl it over the border of a lath. Massage it with your hands. Or perhaps enlist a friend to gently tug it dorsum and forth between you.
  10. You will be surprised by how alive the pelt looks lying across the back of a chair. When the morning or evening sun comes through the window, the beaver's fur glows—like love, similar a polished maple plank, similar burn, like wheat in a fall field. Around the edges the pelt is soft, like milkweed fluff, similar dandelion stars. In the thick center, the fur is deep and luxurious. When yous dig your fingers into it, y'all feel something that yous can't quite put into words. It has something to do with making the best of a bad situation, and the heartbreaking dazzler of this creature.

You can read more than most skinning beavers, stacking firewood, and foraging for mushrooms in Gretchen'southward latest book,Woodsqueer: Crafting a Sustainable Rural Life, out this month from Trinity University Press.Woodsqueer chronicles her experiences intentionally focusing on making a life more in tune with the world on 80 acres in backwoods Maine.