Author
Odell Prather
Hides, horn and tanning · Fort Davis, Texas
Odell ran a hide and leather shop in Fort Davis for twenty four years, then sold the front of it and kept the back. He salts, drains and ships, and he kept every rejection letter.
What does Odell cover here?
Salting schedules, draining, drying, horn and skull work, and what a tannery will and will not accept.
His writing on this site is mostly about time rather than technique. A hide has a clock on it from the moment it comes off, and almost everything that goes wrong is a person missing that clock by a few hours while doing everything else correctly.
He also handles the reference numbers: pounds of salt per cape by species, drain angles, how long a salted hide holds before it needs to move, and the temperature bands where horn caps start to slip.
How Odell got here
He took over a leather shop in 2001 that already had a hide business attached to it, and the hide side outlived the leather side.
For twenty four years he was the last stop between a West Texas hunter and a tannery in another state, which means he saw exactly what survived the trip and what did not. The folder of rejection letters started as bookkeeping and turned into a reference: forty odd hides, each one with a written reason it came back.
What does Odell get wrong?
He is slow to trust a freezer, and it has cost him.
Odell salts almost everything on principle, including capes that would have been better off sealed and frozen because the hunter was three days from a shop. Two aoudad capes in 2023 went stiff on salt in transit when a freezer would have held them fine. He now writes the freezing guidance on this site with Wren checking it, which is the only section of the site he does not sign alone.
More about how this site works is on the about page. Everything Odell has written is filed under field notes.