Serving Proudly As The Voice Of Valley County Since 1913

Rocking a Hunter's Tan

"I just nerded out on the science." Chelsea Dodd, who holds a degree in chemistry, is a self-taught tanner in Glasgow trying to keep a dying art alive.

Tanning is a relatively new hobby for the woman who works for the Glasgow Water Department. She has been learning and refining her technique for roughly three years, working primarily on her own hides while occasionally taking on projects for friends.

This is how I found her – through mutual friends. Dodd had prepared a taxidermy ear for her neighbor's daughter. "An ear! Of all things she wanted an ear!" laughed the tanner. I contacted her the day after Thanksgiving about taking my whitetail hide and making a rug out of it.

Dodd enthusiastically embraced my request. She and her husband Charles had been discussing ways to bring their art and hobby to the community. Dodd, in addition to hides, also creates fur and leather accessories such as hats.

In her backyard, Dodd has set up her work stations. She walked me through her process, explaining each step and the learning curve, from her first sudcessful hunt to her first tanner's kit purchased on Amazon to researching various methods of tanning.

Dodd first set to defleshing the hide since flesh "is a stronghold for bacteria and decay." After that, the hide is covered with a generous amount of salt to draw out any moisture and help keep the hair attached to the hide. She then handwashed the hide with Dawn dish detergent to remove dirt, debris and blood to degrease it.

The next step was pickling. Dodd placed the hide in a citric acid and salt bath to "dissolve all the nonstructural tissues, all the fats and amino acids that are in the skin itself, leaving just the structural proteins such as collagen." The final step was to "stretch like crazy" which gives the back side of the hide that soft buttery feel.

"It's just a constant learning curve," said Dodd about her hobby, "but it's so gratifying."

The hunter and trapper is a fierce advocate for respecting the animals harvested and honoring them by using as much of the animal as possible and avoiding wanton waste.

"You can't just go shoot an animal and not use portions of it. You can't just go take the backstraps," she stressed. "So finding ways to use as much of the animals as possible I think just makes me feel better."

Dodd explained how her understanding of nature grew from an innocence in her youth to understanding that nature can be brutal.

"When I was younger I had ideas that hunting was barbaric," she said, "but being out in nature and experiencing nature, nature is not kind and animals are going to die generally horrific deaths ... or they're going to be shot through the heart by a hunter and have no idea what happened and be dead instantly.So hunting is an amazing tool for taking care of animal populations and having that connection to nature where you're protecting your resources."

For me, the natural-shaped deerskin rug is a welcome addition to my home. An homage to an incredible experience, it also serves as a functional piece in the notoriously cold Montana winter.

 

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