Fox fat

This probably won't apply if you're dealing with roadkill in the countryside, but here in the London suburbs foxes are really well fed and have a healthy store of fat. Which gets a bit unpleasant when you are trying to get it off the skin.

Once you have skinned your fox, what you need to do is scrape any remaining tissue off the skin. The people advising me seemed to think that scraping while the skin is still wet is the thing to do. Thomas from Trackways advised me to get the membrane off that sits between the skin and the flesh. He said it 'looks a bit shiny'. Well, easier said than done. When I was doing my wet scraping, everything looked shiny. The skin, the membrane (if I ever found it) and especially the liquid fat that was coming out of the skin as I scraped it.

In fact, touch is your best guide. It is easier to feel the difference in texture between bare skin and anything else. Sometimes you can see the edge of the tissue you are trying to remove. This is a good thing. With a very sharp knife, blade held at 90° to the skin, you can slowly, slowly, make that edge move. And when I say slowly, I mean slowly. And you are going to want a shower after.

While scraping, more of Mrs Fox's story was uncovered, though. I was very touched to find her teats, two rows of three either side of the cut I made.

Fox smell

It soon became clear that Mrs Fox's skin was not going to dry in the garage, so operations moved indoors. Alex made her this amazing frame. I'll be eternally grateful for all the work he put in. He made a frame with struts in the corners so it wouldn't bend out of shape. And he put notches at regular intervals all around the frame so that the string I was stretching the skin with wouldn't slip. Also, the string fit neatly in the notches so all I had to do was pull them tight and they stuck: no tying necessary. I don't know what I would have done without that frame.

So we brought the whole contraption indoors and found room for it in the hall. But we soon found out that drying fox smells. Bad. To put it bluntly, it smells of something going off. The worst part were her paws and her tail, where quite a lot of tissue just needed to dry out. I tried to speed up the process by using the hair dryer a couple of times. Still, it was a little hard to live with, and for a couple of days it only got worse. So when it got a little too much, and when we expected visitors that just wouldn't understand, Mrs Fox moved into the loft: warmer and drier than the garage, we reckoned.

And it was, until the weather turned colder and condensation formed in the loft. One day, Mrs Fox came down wet. And I panicked. A lot of hairdryer work was done that day. Thankfully the damage was only superficial. She was drying out quite well. Including the large area of fat that I just hadn't been able to get off while the skin was wet. I was a bit worried about dry scraping. I knew this was a known process, but my advisers had only mentioned it as an option for the last little bits. But I knew I couldn't get that stuff off wet.

Right now, Mrs Fox is living in the room where I do all my work. This will tell you that the smell was a temporary thing that we just had to live through for a week or two...

Maggotty paws

One day, Mrs Fox came down from the loft drier than she had been, but with a family of wriggly little maggots between the toes of the paw that had had an infection. This was probably my low point. I don't know what it is about maggots. I just don't like them. Thomas from Trackways had said not to worry about them too much, because they would only eat the bits I wanted to get rid of anyway. So I cleaned them off.

The next morning, Mrs Fox had four maggoty paws. Lovely. I cleaned those off as well and had a good look at her toes. They were lovely and clean, so the little creatures had done their job. Thankfully, I never saw any more.

Dry fox fat

I am a complete convert to the process of dry scraping. It is so much easier. Mind you, the two days of wet scraping I did were probably useful and necessary. It would have been even harder - and no doubt smellier - to dry a thicker layer of fat and tissue. But once I attacked the dry tissue, it just came off. No argument.

It still took me several hours to get the remainder of the tissue off the skin. But it did come off, which wasn't always the case when I was wet scraping. And now it was even easier to tell when I had reached the skin: it feels of suede. In fact, it is suede.

I was surprised how greasy a job it still was. The tissue I was taking of was definitely still very fatty. But I was making visible progress, and that is just very rewarding.

Next

In the next couple of days, Mrs Fox is going to go through the preservation process. I have the first few days of 2007 to do that in. This will involve eggs and elbow grease. And a contraption to smoke the skin. I am just so grateful to Alex who has agreed to sort that one out for me. I'll let you know how it goes.

Next: Egg and Smoke