Due to the rain this weekend, I decided to stay close to home and try to get a few things taken care that I've been procrastinating on for some time now..... like cleaning up the Lopsided 9 that I found dead nearly two months ago (see the archived post from February).

Here's a little hint....if you find a deadhead, let it soak in water for a week or so, but don't wait two months.  Lets just say the skull skinned out pretty easy, but I nearly skinned out the inside of my stomach at the same time.  And we also had a little bit of bad luck and while the skull was soaking, the water turned jet black and ended up staining the antlers.  I've never seen this before, but lessoned learned I guess.   But it looks like the antlers ended up getting cleaned up pretty well.




































And the finished product.  I still have a little bit of cleanup work and need to get him mounted to a plaque, but the tough stuff is done.  He ended up scoring right around 115", not too bad for a 2.5 year old.  After getting so many trail cam pics of him, we really hoped that he would make it another two years.  Unfortunately he gets added to the "man cave" just a little too early.