Wild Game Meat

Most Alaska guide services include wild game meat care in their Alaska hunting packages, but many people prefer to handle this crucial part of the hunting experience themselves. After all, modern humans are far removed from the origins of the animal flesh they consume. Gutting and butchering an animal felled by your own hand can put you in touch with the natural life cycle.

Books such as Care of Game Meat and Trophies by Charles Newton Elliott or the online guide published by ADF&G (http://www.wildlife.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=hunting.planning) can be helpful. You'll most likely be far away from where you are staying when you succeed in your hunt. The most important thing to remember is proper care when bleeding, gutting, butchering, packaging and transporting in order to keep from introducing contaminants into the meat.

Just as there are Alaska hunting regulations, rules apply to consumption as well. Alaska law states that all of the meat of caribou and moose must be salvaged for human consumption - this means everything but meat that is "blood-shot," internal organs, skin, bones, and the head. Fines are high for hunters caught wasting meat. A "Transfer of Possession" form must accompany any meat you give away to others.

Just remember that it takes time to bring down big game, and patience wins the day. As Jack London wrote in The Call of the Wild, "There is a patience of the wild - dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself - that holds motionless for endless hours the spider in its web, the snake in its coils, the panther in its ambuscade; this patience belongs peculiarly to life when it hunts its living food..."

And if you tire of trying to rustle animal protein, you can always trade in big game for big vegetables - Alaska's late-setting summer, midnight sun yields giant vegetables in the Matanuska Valley. Imagine broccoli as tall as your 10-year-old or cabbages that dwarf your neighbor's Miata.

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