fastcompany:

Meat Up: The Best of Jerky Week 2012

Check out the Gen X section to see Steve’s buffalo skull and other prized items he would choose to save in the face of a fire. 

Steve shares his top offal picks in his latest American Hunter article. 

A six-step primer on how to handle—and prevent—this very dangerous scenario that no instructors ever teach you in hunter’s safety classes…

This is a story about a stick, a fire and a dead rabbit…

ieateverythingicook asked: The Wild Within is one of my favorite shows. Is this an official tumblr?

Yes it is, it’s run by Steven with the help of the social media team at Zero Point Zero (production company behind TWW). Thanks for your support!

Just went bowfishing in Western Michigan with two guys from my high school, Jesse Singleton and the outdoor writer Tracy Breen. I’m about the worst bowfisherman on the planet, which has long plagued me. That’s because, as far as I’m concerned, it’s impossible to be a total badass outdoorsman without being able to hit a fish with an arrow on a consistent basis. So I’ve been practicing lately and tampering with new gear in order to figure things out. After studying refraction and shooting at various leaves and busted clam shells on the bottom of lakes and ponds, I figured I was ready for some serious action. I suggested that we target gar pike. I had three reasons for this: one, I’d never gotten one with a bow; two, they’re good to eat (more on that later); and three, they’re so damn skinny that hitting a couple of them rules out luck in a way that hitting dog-sized carp does not. Here are some photos:


That’s a Mathews Genesis Pro. What makes the bow good for bowfishing, even though it’s not marketed as a bowfishing bow,  is that you can shoot it at any stage in the draw cycle. It’s like a recurve in that way, except that it has the size and feel of a compound. Makes it perfect for snap shooting at quick moving fish when you don’t have time to come to full draw and find your anchor point. The draw weight if very light as well, as you don’t need a lot of poundage to puncture most fish. And a light draw weight is also good when you might be shooting a lot of arrows (which means of lot of pulling back), or shooting arrows into backdrops that include rocks and submerged logs that either damage or detain arrows.   


Here’s my first gar. He was about 12 feet off the bow of the boat, a foot beneath the surface, and moving. I was pretty pleased with myself. That fish arrow is made by Cajun Archery. 


Now for cleaning. Step one is to have a dead gar lying on the ground. (From here on out, the photo quality really starts to plummet because we’re going from Tracy’s very nice photos to my trashy cell phone pictures.)


The gar’s usable meat occurs as two loins, or backstraps, along each side of the spine. To begin removing them, use heavy duty kitchen shears or sheet metal shears to cut through the gar’s armor plating of thick scales and skin. Start at the dorsal fine and, following the backbone, move all the way up to the base of the head. 


Once the main incision is made up the spine, extend the cut down each side of the fish and begin peeling back the skin. Then remove the strip by making a second incision through the armor along the fish’s flank. It’s like removing a peel from a banana, if bananas were made from sheet metal. The goal is to remove enough armor to expose the delicate flesh beneath, which can be removed like peeling the backstrap off a deer. 


Here’s the gar with the two peels of armor removed and one loin removed. Once the other loin is stripped out, it’s time to get cooking. Now get off your ass and get fishing!

Steve drops by ZPZ HQ, perhaps new episodes in the works?…

Bear meat is highly edible and can be quite delicious depending on what the bear’s been eating and how it’s been handled. But before you start messing around with bear meat you need to consider the risk of trichinosis. It’s a disease caused by infection of larvae from a type of parasitic round worm known as Trichina spiralis. The worm is the reason why you’re traditionally supposed to cook your pork to well done, though trichinosis has been largely eradicated from domestic pork. Nowadays, over 90% of U.S. trichinosis cases are attributable to bear meat, though even that number is relatively small and usually includes far fewer people than your average high school classroom. Other known vectors of the disease in recent decades have included mountain lion, wild boar, and even walrus.

Animals contract trichinosis in the same way that humans do, through the consumption of flesh that is infected with the worms. Domestic pork used to carry trichinosis largely because of the practice of feeding them uncooked garbage; rats and mice in the garbage were consumed raw along with the trash and the rodents passed along the disease. In 1980, uncooked garbage was banned as pork feed; since then, cases of trichinosis in pork have all but vanished.

Bears, obviously, have not gotten this memo. They still eat whatever they please. In many areas, it’s basically just a matter of time before an individual bear eats something and picks up the worm. In Montana’s Lincoln and Sanders Counties, 100% of bears over six years of age have tested positive for the parasite.

The first bear I ever killed, well over a decade ago, was an eighteen-year-old bruiser from Lincoln County. I cut out an ounce or so of his tongue and sent it for testing at Montana State University in Bozeman. Sure enough, the test results came back positive. The state informed me that I was excused from the wanton waste laws, which require that all bear meat be salvaged and used. However, I was ineligible for a new bear license.

By then I’d already processed the meat and had 87 pounds of ground burger and close to 60 pounds of steaks and roasts. A basic survey of literature on the disease suggested that the parasite was very easy to kill with thorough cooking. An internal temperature of 137 degrees Fahrenheit is all it takes, though obviously you want to go a little hotter to make sure. Also, there is strong evidence–though not official government endorsment– to support the conclusion that freezing infected meat for a month at a temperature lower than 5 degrees will kill it.

So I went ahead and bought a trusty meat thermometer and started eating bear burgers and bear steaks. Obviously, I’m still alive. Now, I don’t even bother testing my bear meat. The results are not going to alter my behavior, no matter what they are. I’ll still eat my bear meat, cooked to a medium doneness. And even if you contract trichinosis, it doesn’t mean you’ve had your last bear hunt. Early symptoms, if any, include muscle fatigue, diarrhea, heartburn, and fatigue. If you catch it early, it’s easily treated. So go ahead and eat that bear meat in your freezer. You’ve got no excuse to let it sit in your freezer until it’s freezer burned. Remember: you kill it, you eat it.

A batch of black bear summer sausage in Steven’s kitchen gets ready for the stuffer.  Trichinosis or not, it’s getting eaten and enjoyed.

So we ended getting Ronny a bear, along with the one I got. We got his on our last night out, just before dark, so we were big time lucky. The third bear we spotted that night was a nice boar and everything played out perfectly. We were able to beach the skiff downwind of the bear and then Ronny stalked in to about 180 yards and made a great shot with the spickety new 7mm that I got from Carolina Custom Rifles. In all, we got on to a dozen bears, most of them single boars. As the spring progresses, a lot more sows with cubs will be moseying around as well. Here are some shots from the trip (Camera shots, mind you. Not rifle shots.)

Here’s a typical coastal southeast Alaska black bear spot. Notice the wide strip of grass flats on the edge of the tide line. Those usually grow well around the alluvium of stream mouths and that’s where you can find bears somewhat reliably. I should clarify that and say that you can find stationary bears there somewhat reliably. They’ll turn up just about anywhere, but they’ll moving if it’s not good food and they’re difficult to catch up to. About half the bears we saw were eating mussels (the same kind you get in restaurants.) The other half, mostly grass.

Here’s a closeup of the grass flat where I killed my boar. I watched him on and off in there for forty-five minutes before getting a good clear shot. By then I was only sixty yards away. All in all, this grass flat covers about as much ground as a football field. The stream gets a decent salmon run, and the bears feed here big time in the fall on fish carcasses.

The boar I killed. His meats in my freezer, his hides at a tanner, and his skull is waiting to get boiled and cleaned in my backyard.

Here I’m making the opening skinning cuts at the tideline next to my workshop at my shack. Once the hide is removed, I’ll salt it thoroughly to keep it from spoiling while it awaits the tannery. I’ve got a couple bear hides right now, so I’m not sure if I’ll keep this one or give it away.

Here’s my shack, which I own with two brothers, Matt and Danny, along with our buddy Dan Bogan. The place looks pretty inviting with a couple hundred pounds of bear (and bear meat) hanging from a skinning gambrel. We have a freezer in the wood storage room next to the shack, and we can run it off a generator to keep meat cool in hot weather. Works great.

Here’s me approaching Ronny’s downed bear a few minutes after he shot. Black bears are hardly dangerous, but you don’t want to be stupid when you approach them. Give them a poke with your barrel to make sure they’re good and dead. If you poke an eye and it doesn’t flinch or blink, he’s surely dead.

Ronny and his bear. We were up until 1:30 a.m. skinning and butchering meat; then back up at 4:00 a.m. to clean up the place and put the boat and motor up above tideline. It was a bruiser of a trip, but worth the effort. As soon as I get them from Ronny, I’ll post some more photos that include some hot clam diggin’ action on a low tide.