Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting And then the fight started...

Thanks Santiam, I've drifted through these parts a time or two, just never stepped up to memorize another forum moniker and password. Reckon you've seen me other places

Guess I am just lucky, as the wife fully understands drying wall tents in the living room, the need for a variety of arms and rods, and will buck up with no complaints in whatever weather mother nature dishes out.

Thats awful narrow minded of her ...Least U didn't use the wash machine a few feet away...GRINNN...

It's your house too. At least you're not cooking it on the stove.

So how do you rendered bear fat? Just cook it down or what?

In answer to a couple posts.

One can render bear fat down by slow cooking on a stove under relatively low heat, ( a cast iron pan works well) then pouring the lard off, and letting it cool/harden. Low heat- don't burn it! Remove the cracklings when rendered out and just keep adding...

Makes the best pastries/pies ever!

Assuming it is not tainted with wild onions or such...

I have previously posted a picture of skinning out a frozen caribou in the living room.... coming up on 40 (marriage) - you would think she'd be used to this kind of stuff by now, but noooooo....

Never rendered bear fat, but have done a lot of pork fat, on the kitchen stove. I always put a little water in at first to keep from scorching the fat. It will go away as steam as the rendering processes. miles

Not bear fat, but it gives an idea as to the feelings about grease by other cultures.

Good Grease
The hunters went out with guns
at dawn.
We had no meat in the village,
no food for the tribe and the dogs.
No caribou in the caches.

All day we waited.
At last!
As darkness hung at the river
we children saw them far away.
Yes! They were carrying caribou!
We jumped and shouted!

By the fires that night
we feasted.

The old ones chuckled,
sucking and smacking,
sopping the juices with sourdough bread.
The grease would warm us
when hungry winter howled.

Grease was beautiful
oozing,
dripping and running down our chins,
brown hands shining with grease.
We talk of it
when we see each other
far from home.

Remember the marrow
sweet in the bones?
We grabbed for them like candy.
Good.
Gooooood.

Good grease.

Mary TallMountain


Had a friend who always had a can of bear grease around for his boots. I sure miss him and his ways.

Geno

Yup.

Bill

I had a friend that thought he would render some bear fat down and use it on his boots.I don't know what he did wrong,but when he brought his boots into the tent,I gagged.

Same bear,he cut up and put it in his freezer. The kids were playing in the garage where the freezer was one day and must have unplugged it. About two weeks later, he had cause to open the freezer. He called me quick to help him get it out of the garage and it was really putrid.I have smelled dead humans that were pretty ripe,but they wouldn't compare to that smell. We tried scrubbing it out but no way could we get the smell out.The freezer ended up in the county dump the next day.

This all occurred in about 1967 or so. I have had an aversion to bears since then. I still remember that smell.

happy wife, happy life !

Thanks las.

Jacuzzi ?

had the same thing happen, but worse than rotten bear is rotten Salmon. lost a freezer to that mishap.

I've been here a long while, but I sure can't recall that!

Can you post up some pictures? I'd like to see that!

Takes me back to the days when I was a student living in an apartment with a kitchenette so tiny that I had blood half way up all four walls from butchering a moose calf! (sadly no pictures, but it looked like a very gruesome crime scene!)

John