ORIGINAL: Centaur 1

Heat's the enemy, cool it asap. I learned that the hard way. I was taught that you "have" to age deer before butchering. That's fine in the winter but deer killed during the early bow season never tasted right. The old timers used to say that the deer still had parasites when the weather was warm that you have to wait until the first hard freeze before you kill a deer. They were wrong, it was just rotten. One time I went to butcher a deer that I killed about five days earlier only to find that the body cavity was full of maggots. From then on I never aged anything, and the meat never tasted better. Skin it, quarter it, and get it on ice. Keep it colduntilyou're ready to butcher it.