Hanna sat silently in the boughs of a large, sprawling oak tree. It lacked foliage, but for her plan, that didn't matter. She'd sent Tobias out on a special mission to find a pair of deer to be weeded out of their herd. Knowing a deer's flighty tendency, Tobias was to spook the deer and send each one separately toward her, giving her a chance to slaughter the first before the arrival of the second. Sure enough, a stag limped into view, some creature or accident having broken its leg. The hawk could be seen swooping around it, slashing at it with sharp talons or beating its haunches with powerful strokes of his wings. With a sharp cry, the hawk left the buck to its ambling, slowed course, trusting Hanna to track it down and kill it.
Leaping nimbly from her branch, Hanna ran up to the buck, grabbing its antlers and swinging aboard. It did its best to throw her, but she tightened her legs around it and, with a practiced motion, drew her knife and slit his throat close to the jawline. Hopping away from the kill, she dragged it a short ways toward the cabin before turning to watch for the other deer. This one, she saw, walked normally, but it was noticeably ill. Its head drooped, and it seemed to stagger occasionally. The doe was herded much as the male deer was, and she dispatched it the same way. A job well done, in her opinion. Now to prepare them.
Throwing both carcasses over her shoulders, wincing at the pain it elicited from the still-healing left one, Hanna jogged back to the cabin, where a book with a broken binding lay out on her table. She smiled at the stretching rack she'd formed for the bear hide, which she'd skinned before lacing it into the stretcher. There were still ragged chunks of meat clinging to it, but that would soon change. It would look lovely once she was finished with it. Its brains still sat in its skull in the snow, waiting to be rubbed into the hide, and a stone she'd found to be suitable rested next to the woven stretcher, ready for use. Hmm.. Three things to do, and two hands to do it with. Time for back-up. "Svara!!!!"
A little gross, but it's research
And another
On skinning
Different forms of tanning.